Since the outbreak of the covid-19 pandemic in 2020, humanity has experienced multiple micro and macro traumas concerning the way of life, self-care, collective responsibility, learning, cultural experience, and politics. This may seem too general a formulation to start from, yet the whole point of the pandemic situation is to be found exactly in its general—or even universal—affect(ion) and effect upon the human condition, mediated by the process of contagion. This historical landmark can be interpreted as a negative factual argument for the reconsideration of the classical ideal of philosophical universalism: although every state, every culture, and every community has its own identity and socio-political inclinations, they were all crossed by the covid-19 virus and, thus, all were obliged to react in one manner or another. Hence, it is not a theoretical exaggeration to point to the urge to rethink the concept of “humanity,” to reassess the relation between the microcosm of the individual and the macrostructure(s) of society, to both deconstruct and reconstruct the speculative dependence between liberty and responsibility, to design new ways of (e)learning, and to highlight once more the (e)motional and critical role of culture(s).
Art, as always, had an important function in helping us to express our condition(ings) and—maybe more insightfully than statistics, with which we were assaulted daily—was a mirror of emotions, vulnerabilities, conflicting perspectives, and needs. My starting point in the present study is that by analyzing some characteristics of performing—and thus mimetic—arts such as music and dance, we can better understand the profundity and specificity of the traumas experienced during the pandemic. This assumption is sustained by an argument assembled from three ideas: First, music, dance, theater—and generally all the arts that have a performative dimension—work with the body, and in a medical context in which bodily (re)actions have the primacy of “speaking,” it should be clear that a relation of mirroring between performative arts and medical performances is unavoidable. Second, the performing arts were among the most affected areas of human activity precisely because they rely on physical participation. The difficulties were not only financial, but were
In this line of thought, the concept of “minor mimesis”—the tradition of mimetic theories as rediscovered and expanded within the Homo Mimeticus project,1 a tradition that links mimesis with the body—has an essential part. Since “mimetic relations are the very condition that brings the ego into life as a relational, affective being,”2 this whole discussion about performance, body, emotional vulnerability, participation, and community implies as a core concept mimesis in its bodily interpretation—which implies a switch from its main visual-representational interpretation. The other core concept that is presupposed in this articulation is that of “animation,” because, alongside mimesis, the fact of movement is another elementary dimension that comes into play; not just any type of movement, but that which determines organic life. However, the pandemic, whose effects are still ongoing, is explicitly, directly, and undeniably a crisis concerning animation. By “animation” I mean our need and capacity for bodily movement in the world, our need and capacity for relating with others within a community, and our multilayered impulse to be influenced by others through bodily mimetic reflexes. The pandemic attacked life both in a medical sense and in a psychological-cultural sense, the main link between the two being the phenomenon of animation.
Ancient symbols and philosophies had already connected the fact of being alive, of having spirit, and of transformation with the idea of animation and the circular movement of breathing. The pandemic suspended bodily organic movement and our traditional physical situations of collective ingression, and had as its major terrifying image the inability to breathe, while on the other hand, it trans-figured all these basic abilities and needs by (re)placing them in the virtual world, where the body became an avatar and where actual movement was only mental or discursive. In this realm, mimesis was once again, through intensive digitalization, active as almost uncontrolled image and word
The main contribution of this study is to bridge minor mimesis and animation, inspired by what the pandemic revealed about the human body. On the one hand, the methodology is analytical because I will use text analysis and conceptual problematization. On the other, since it begins from my own experiences with dance and music during the pandemic, it has an intended subjective and emotional side transmitted through description. Also, as a methodological observation, this chapter, although it has a philosophical character, can be seen as a case study because I also rely on my first-hand experience of what happened with dance communities in Bucharest, Romania.
1 Musical Mimesis as Embodied Impulse
Music is usually thought of as separated from the world of representations and objects, although it has a recognized capacity for evocation. Nowadays, in accordance with ancient intuitions, music is associated—especially if we take into consideration the most complex techniques of contemporary composition—much more easily with abstract endeavors such as mathematics, philosophy, or science than with plastic intuitions, even if art history preserves valuable attempts to establishes correspondences between music and painting by artists such as Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and Alexander Scriabin. Even pop(ular) music can be construed as a form of abstraction through the overall simplification of rhythmic and melodic patterns. Therefore, it is not easy to immediately grasp how we can relate music to mimesis. Still, in the philosophy of music of Theodor Adorno, one of the most important music theorists of the twentieth century, musical mimesis is fundamental.4
Art uses the rationality of the world of empirical reality mimetically as a means of freeing itself from the repression of means-end rationality. Mimetic adaptation constitutes the mediation of Subject and Object within the material structure of the work of art.5
This issue is approached in a chapter about mediation because, for Adorno, the main dialectical movement within the work of art is that between “form” as an expression of social totality and “the musical idea” as the subjective driving of the artist. For instance, in western music, classical forms such as the sonata or the symphony have a structure clearly defined historically by social constraints. Thus, the deformation, fragmentation, and hybridization of such forms were the result of subjective needs and, indeed, the modern history of European musical practices is identified with such deconstructions of inherited musical forms. A suggestive example is Gustav Mahler’s music, in which this negative evolution through the gradual re-formation of musical language reached its aesthetic peak, when the forms are still definitely recognizable, yet either imbued with irony and satire or modeled at very different scales than before: “The very fibre of the music contradicts the meaning of the formal categories”6 and “the inauthenticity of the language of music becomes the expression of its substance.”7 Hence, this dialectical structure of the musical work of art is a re-enacting of the prim(itiv)e anthropological function of mimetic representations.
On the other hand, however, the legacy of the pre-rational, magical and mimetic also survives within the language-like aspect: through its development into language, music has asserted itself as an organ of imitation—but, in contrast to its early, gestural-mimetic impulses, it is now a subjectively mediated and reflected imitation, the imitation of what takes place within human beings. The process of music’s development into language simultaneously means its transformation into convention and expression. In so far as the dialectic of enlightenment process consists essentially in the irreconcilability of these two aspects, however, this dual character places all Western music in a state of contradiction.11
It seems to me that Adorno offers a powerful and credible image of the work [of art] and its dynamics when he points out that mimesis is always threatening to regress to its magical and cultic origins, while rationality … threatens to stultify the work through reification.13
The Aristotelian mark in Adorno’s mimesis and the centrality it has in his thoughts about music, with both negative and positive connotations, is why
What, then, can the term “mimesis” mean in this context? Does Lukács use the representational qualities (realistic, allegorical, or symbolic) that characterize the other arts only to subject music to the strait-jacket of materialistically deduced theories? I think not. Instead, what Lukács wishes to argue is that music actually contains “reflections of reflections” rather than direct reflections themselves. He further maintains that music’s seemingly unrealistic forms of expression have an undeniable sociopolitical concreteness in spite of that indirectness. In short, music, for Lukács, embodies a “double mimesis” or “mimesis of mimesis” that is not based on any obvious similarity to concrete objects.15
Adorno and Lukács’s views on this matter are significant because they catch a glimpse of the profound way in which music and dance were once related through bodily feelings and through the principle of mimetic (re)actions. Music has a clear-cut corporeal side when treated from the stance of the interpreter because the place of a performance, the presence and participation of the audience, the feeling of the instrument, and the entire pantomime of the interpreter themself are not only epiphenomenal elements, but, seen from the perspective of the mimetic principle, are essential elements of music. These essential elements that provide the actual embodiment of music alongside the
2 Thinking in Movement and Theatrical Mimesis
Contemporary dance improvisation has a special significance in relation to the interrogations of contemporary philosophy because it is a living image of many big themes, such as the mind-body problem, movement, the body and the world, language and gesture, and otherness and the politics of the body. It is a creative way to discover that our body is much more than simply flesh: It is saturated by cultural norms imposed upon it; it is a complex organism that interacts with anything in its Umwelt, from wind to words; it is a living legacy of thousands of years of biological evolution; and it is the interface through which we communicate with our peers, while also being the first and most intimate foundation of our self-identity.16 The body is the site of personal ontology and is the chain that links the network that is “society.” Hence, dance is an art form that researches and expresses all these multiple attributes of the body. Contemporary dance improvisation is especially relevant because, on the one hand, it can be practiced by amateurs and, on the other, it aims at unleashing the naturalness and forgotten complex reflexes of bodily articulations. The body in movement is neither only a substance nor only a process. From its beginnings, the moving body is a plastic entity in motion, its motion being its substance. Thus, the dancing body is a concrete example of contemporary process, posthumanist, and eco-logical ontology.
Hence, if one would speak at all of a systematic reasonableness of meaning, it would not be in terms of an externally imposed scheme of some kind, but in terms of a kinetic bodily logos, a body that, in thinking in movement, grasps the global qualitative dynamics in which it is enmeshed.18
During the pandemic, I had the opportunity to practice dance improvisation. At Linotip,19 an independent choreographic center in Bucharest, Romania, I participated in a series of workshops—of course, respecting the restrictions imposed by the pandemic situation—an experience that fits the manner in which Sheets-Johnstone tried to linguistically depict the phenomenon of thinking in movement and IJsseling’s observation about how mimesis informs the dance movement.20 As the titles themselves suggest, these workshops were, in fact, a constellation of perspectives about the possibilities of the body. In all of
In other words, in mimesis man discovers and reveals himself and reality. Through it, man can present himself to himself and to others as he is, and reality can appear as it appears. At the same time, something withdraws and something is taken from man and reality, something that he has in fact never possessed—namely, full coincidence with himself.22
In March 2021, I experienced another type of dance workshop,23 which was oriented toward the therapeutical function of dance using theatrical means. The most surprising part of this experience was when we watched each other dance, with masks and costumes, through a little mirror. It multiplied the dimensions of reality, obliged us to focus on bodily expression, helped us manifest ourselves in a safe space behind the mask, and was mimetic to the extreme (see Figure 5.1). Therefore, it was an intense emotional participation enhanced by mimetic theatrical practices: “Theatrical mimesis, in this regard, arises not from the distinction between a real original and an illusory copy but from a particular kind of action and attention, from the ‘doings’ of actor and audience rather than the ‘being’ of ‘spectacle.’”24
These descriptions support the hypothesis of the “mimetic unconscious” theorized by Nidesh Lawtoo in The Phantom of the Ego: “This account of the unconscious is thus not private but social; not egocentric but relational; it does not claim to have a universal, transhistorical validity, but is self-consciously informed by the historical conditions of modernity.”25 Also, it is essentially embodied and thus is reflected in what dance improvisation reveals about the suppressed reflexes of the body. The traditional suppression or oppression of the body in classical western metaphysics is, not uncoincidentally, at the same time the diminution of the minor mimesis tradition and the oblivion of dance as an art. Still, it is not clear how and why the body is so intimately connected with mimesis. My thesis is that this is so through the notion of animation because, every time minor mimesis comes up, it is related to “reflexes,” “movement,” “rhythm,” “action,” and the fact of “relatedness” itself. Even in Lawtoo’s
Sheets-Johnstone is perhaps the most passionate scholar to advocate for the primacy of animation with the aim of generally understanding the mysterious phenomenon of life and, in particular, the phenomenon that is the human complex capacity of “thinking in movement.” Hence, the main characteristics of animation—according to her research based on Husserlian phenomenology, neuroscientific data, dance studies, evolutionist paleo-anthropology, and psychological experiments about infant behavior—refer to movement within a whole organic being as a fundamental constituent of aliveness. Movement is felt within the human organism through proprioception and kinesthesia and animated movement is recognizable through a qualitative dynamic. Animation is an original phenomenon, being the “sensuous basis of experience,”27 and, due to the fact that emotions are processes in the body, “emotion and movement coincide.” Hence, animation “delineates a particular kinetic domain of dispositions,” and creates and disseminates “nonlinguistic corporeal meanings.”28
The dance of souls
photo by cosmin manolescu and areal
3 Pandemic Vulnerabilities and the Posthuman Subject
In the last year, contemporary society was taken by surprise by the appearance of some events that disrupted its linear existence and forced it to rethink its actions, the relationship with the environment, the relationship between state and citizen, transnational mobility, cultural identity. … In the middle of these situations is the body, this “biological vessel” that we try to protect and keep intact, but at the same time it is the generator of change, transformation and progress. … What can be the new cinematic and performative formats, what topics become relevant when you are forced by circumstances to be aware of borders and how can you transgress these boundaries using the body, cinematic art, science and new technologies?29
Evolutionary forms of life are clearly living subjects of particular Umwelts, and as such create synergies of meaningful movement, synergies that assure their survival.
… Humans alone, notably modern, present-day ones, languish, ensnared in a subject/world divide. … In truth, the problem is one of their own making, a fabrication of thought. … Animation is a corrective to such “embeddings” and “chiasmatic” solutions: it is the most just that properly describes living creatures as living and thus necessarily, that is, naturally, in the full sense of nature, links them inseparably to and
within a spatio-temporal world distinctive to their ways of being, i.e. to an Umwelt.31
Rather than dismissing the religious anthropology intrinsic to the Na’vi’s account of trance as a form of “pagan voodoo,” let us use it to diagnose the posthuman’s subject mesmerizing transition (trance, from Latin transire, to pass) to a virtual avatar who is oneself while being someone else.32
The real-sensual body and its online avatar are at the core of the pandemic, as Katherine Hayles also stresses, in order to account for the huge gaps between people’s ideas about what happened and about the restrictions: “It is obvious from people’s reactions that whole-body emotions are involved that go far beyond, and deeper, than intellectual arguments by themselves.”33
Still, another significant bridge connecting posthumanism, animation, and mimesis is a much more tempered attitude toward the cultural European past, namely the meta-theoretical idea itself of finding anchors, bridges, links, and references to past concepts and thought frameworks. Posthumanism does not come from nowhere and its indebtedness to the past as an epistemological and historical “condition of possibility” is a key methodological element of self-awareness. There are many movements of re-capitulation and re-configuration, this fact being a suggestion of the need to put old concepts and schemes into dialog with new concrete experiences and situations. This dialog should not be thought of in terms of “the obsolete” versus “the progressive”—where the “new” implicitly has priority by simply existing—but in terms of the mutual
4 Concluding Remarks
The sensation of being alive is among the most precious feelings one can experience during a lifetime and this sensation is traditionally associated with the joy of dancing and with the sensuality of music. At the heart of these manifestations are animation and mimesis. Both concepts help understand what bonds individuals with a community, both are means for self-knowledge, and both are highly ambiguous—especially when related to technological means. This ambiguity is neither positive nor negative; it depends on usage and context, as anything that has human origins. Art itself can be used either for ideological purposes or for sincere expression of thoughts and emotions. The pandemic definitely brought to light all the layers of mimesis: organic mimesis, anthropological mimesis, expressionist mimesis, theatrical mimesis, and hypermimesis, because it “played” with the body, it forced new solutions to adapt,
For details about the project and about the fundamental concepts developed, the most recent and comprehensive reference is Nidesh Lawtoo, Homo Mimeticus: A New Theory of Imitation (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2022).
Nidesh Lawtoo, The Phantom of the Ego: Modernism and the Mimetic Unconscious (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2013), 18.
Relevant contributions on the topic of posthuman mimesis can also be found in Nidesh Lawtoo, ed., “Posthuman Mimesis,” Special Issue, Journal of Posthumanism 2 no. 2 (2022),
Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).
Max Paddison, Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 141.
Theodor W. Adorno, Quasi Una Fantasia: Essays on Modern Music, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London and New York: Verso, 2011), 84.
Adorno, Quasi Una Fantasia, 85.
Paddison, Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music, 141.
Max Paddison, “Mimesis and the Aesthetics of Musical Expression,” Music Analysis 29, no. 1–3 (March–October 2010): 126–48, 126. For a more recent reference on Adorno’s concept of mimesis in relation to Caillois focused specifically on its link with the posthuman mimesis, see Philipp Wolf, “Posthuman Mimétisme: Caillois, Adorno and an Aesthetics of Mimesis,” Journal of Posthumanism 2, no. 2 (2022): 125–37,
Paddison, “Mimesis and the Aesthetics,” 128.
Theodor W. Adorno, “On the Current Relationship Between Philosophy and Music,” in Night Music, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Wieland Hoban (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2019), 1283–314, 296–97.
Adorno, Quasi Una Fantasia, 198.
Paddison, “Mimesis and the Aesthetics,” 139.
Paddison, “Mimesis and the Aesthetics,” 134.
Jost Hermand, “Double Mimesis: Georg Lukács’s Philosophy of Music,” in Sound Figures of Modernity: German Music and Philosophy, eds. Jost Hermand and Gerhard Richter (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), 244–60, 251.
On mimesis, the human body, and its evolutionist stance alongside other species within a posthumanist thought framework, see Roberto Marchesini, “Zoomimesis: How Birds Taught Us That We Can Fly,” Journal of Posthumanism 2, no. 2 (2022): 115–24,
Samuel IJsseling. Mimesis: On Appearing and Being, trans. Hester IJsseling and Jeffrey Bloechl (Kampen: Kok Pharos Publishing House, 1997), 9.
Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, The Primacy of Movement, expanded 2nd edition (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2011), 424.
Their official web page is
“Corpul Resursă (The Body as Resource),” by the choreographer Arcadie Rusu, July 10–23, 2020; “Corpul Creativ (The Creative Body),” by the choreographer Andrea Gavriliu, September 28–October 1, 2020; and “Act in Motion: Expressivity in Interpretation and Composition,” by choreographer Attila Bordás, February 22–25, 2021.
Again, we could remember and reconnect these contemporary experiences and concepts with Nietzsche’s inspiring account of the relation between the Apollonian and the Dionysian arts.
IJsseling. Mimesis, 36.
“The Dance of Souls,” by choreographer and cultural manager Cosmin Manolescu at areaL | A Space for Choreographic Development, March 19–27, 2021,
Matthew Potolsky, Mimesis (New York and London: Routledge, 2006), 74.
Lawtoo, The Phantom of the Ego, 15.
Lawtoo, The Phantom of the Ego, 6, 16, 24.
Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, “The Lived Body,” The Humanistic Psychologist 48, no. 1 (2020): 28–53, 20,
Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, The Primacy of Movement, 454, 18.
Simona Deaconescu, Program of the Bucharest International Dance Film Festival, September 1–5, 2021,
The following brief description of the core ideas of posthumanism is a personal reformulation of ideas found in Pramod K. Nayar, Posthumanism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014), Rosi Braidotti, Posthuman Knowledge (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019); and Francesca Ferrando, Philosophical Posthumanism (London: Bloomsbury, 2019).
Sheets-Johnstone, The Primacy of Movement, 462–63.
Nidesh Lawtoo, “Avatar Simulation in 3Ts: Techne, Trance, Transformation,” Science Fiction Studies 41, no. 1 (March 2015): 132–50, 139.
N. Katherine Hayles and Nidesh Lawtoo, “Posthuman Mimesis ii—Connections: A Dialogue between Nidesh Lawtoo and Katherine Hayles,” Journal of Posthumanism 2, no. 2 (2022): 181–91, 187,
Paola Pivi, “25,000 covid Jokes (It’s Not a Joke),” June 24–September 12, 2021, exhibition at Centre de la Vieille Charité, Marseille,
References
Adorno, Theodor W. “On the Current Relationship Between Philosophy and Music.” In Night Music, edited by Rolf Tiedemann. Translated by Wieland Hoban, 283–314. Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2019.
Adorno, Theodor W. Philosophy of New Music. Translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.
Adorno, Theodor W. Quasi Una Fantasia: Essays on Modern Music. Translated by Rodney Livingstone. London and New York: Verso, 2011.
Braidotti, Rosi. Posthuman Knowledge. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019.
Deaconescu, Simona. Opening Note for the Programme of the Bucharest International Dance Film Festival, September 1–5, 2021. https://web.archive.org/web/20210907233935/http://www.bidff.ro/eng#new-page-2.
Ferrando, Francesca. Philosophical Posthumanism. London: Bloomsbury, 2019.
Hayles, J. Katherine, and Nidesh Lawtoo. “Posthuman Mimesis ii—Connections: A Dialogue between Nidesh Lawtoo and Katherine Hayles.” Journal of Posthumanism 2, no. 2 (2022): 181–91. https://doi.org/10.33182/joph.v2i2.1939.
Hermand, Jost. “Double Mimesis: Georg Lukács’s Philosophy of Music.” Sound Figures of Modernity: German Music and Philosophy, edited by Jost Hermand and Gerhard Richter, 244–60. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006.
IJsseling, Samuel. Mimesis: On Appearing and Being. Translated by Hester IJsseling and Jeffrey Bloechl. Kampen: Kok Pharos Publishing House, 1997.
Lawtoo, Nidesh. “Avatar Simulation in 3Ts: Techne, Trance, Transformation.” Science Fiction Studies 41, no. 1 (March 2015): 132–50.
Lawtoo, Nidesh. Homo Mimeticus: A New Theory of Imitation .Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2022.
Lawtoo, Nidesh, ed. “Posthuman Mimesis.” Special Issue. Journal of Posthumanism 2 no. 2 (2022), https://journals.tplondon.com/jp/issue/view/124.
Lawtoo, Nidesh. The Phantom of the Ego: Modernism and the Mimetic Unconscious. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2013.
Marchesini, Roberto. “Zoomimesis: How Birds Taught Us That We Can Fly.” Journal of Posthumanism 2, no. 2 (2022): 115–24. https://doi.org/10.33182/joph.v2i2.1863.
Nayar, Pramod K. Posthumanism. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014.
Paddison, Max. Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Paddison, Max. “Mimesis and the Aesthetics of Musical Expression.” Music Analysis 29, no. 1–3 (March–October 2010): 126–48.
Pivi, Paola. “25,000 covid Jokes (It’s Not a Joke). 2021. Exhibition at Centre de la Vieille Charité, Marseille, June 24–September 12, 2021. www.perrotin.com/exhibitions/paola_pivi-25-000-covid-jokes-its-not-a-joke/9517.
Potolsky, Matthew. Mimesis. New York and London: Routledge, 2006.
Sheets-Johnstone, Maxine. “The Lived Body.” The Humanistic Psychologist 48, no. 1 (2020) 28–53. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/hum0000150.
Sheets-Johnstone, Maxine. The Primacy of Movement. Expanded 2nd ed. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2011.
Wolf, Philipp. “Posthuman Mimétisme: Caillois, Adorno and an Aesthetics of Mimesis.” Journal of Posthumanism 2, no. 2 (2022): 125–37. https://doi.org/10.33182/joph.v2i2.1940.