Читать книгу: «Vol. 1(1). 2018»

Редактор Сергей Анатольевич Дзикевич

ISBN 978-5-4490-9687-6

Создано в интеллектуальной издательской системе Ridero

РЕДАКЦИЯ / EDITORIAL TEAM

Международный редакционный совет /

International Editorial Council

Noel Carroll, USA /

Ноэль Кэрролл, США

Antanas Andrijauskas, Lithuania /

Антанас Андрияускас, Литва

Peng Feng, China /

Пен Фен, Китай

Beata Frydryczak, Poland /

Беата Фридричак, Польша

Mateusz Salwa, Poland /

Maтеуш Салва, Польша

Christoph Wulf, Germany /

Кристоф Вульф, Германия

Марат Афасижев, Россия /

Marat Afasizhev, Russia

Marija Vabalaite, Lithuania /

Мария Вабалайте, Литва

Редакционная коллегия /

Editorial Board

Сергей Дзикевич, главный редактор /

Sergey Dzikevich, Editor-in-Chief

Евгений Кондратьев, заместитель

главного редактора /

Yevgeniy Kondratiev, Deputy

Editor-in-Chief

Елена Богатырева /

Elena Bogatyreva

Елена Романова /

Elena Romanova

Евгений Добров, редактор-секретарь /

Yevgeniy Dobrov, Editorial Secretary

ЧИТАЙТЕ В ЭТОМ ВЫПУСКЕ

Редакционная статья

Теория

МИМЕТИЧЕСКОЕ ТВОРЧЕСТВО ВООБРАЖЕНИЯ

Кристоф Вульф / Германия

(Полный текст на английском и русском языках)

ПРИРОДА ЭСТЕТИЧЕСКОГО И ВОЗНИКНОВЕНИЕ ИСКУССТВА

Марат Афасижев / Россия

(Полный текст на русском языке и справочные данные на английском языке)

История

ЭСТЕТИКА ПОСЛЕ ДИСКУССИЙ О МОДЕРНЕ И ПОСТМОДЕРНЕ

Елена Богатырёва / Россия

(Полный текст на русском языке и справочные данные на английском языке)

переводы

ДЖОРДЖ ДИКИ

ИСКУССТВО И ЭСТЕТИЧЕСКОЕ: ИНСТИТУЦИОНАЛЬНЫЙ АНАЛИЗ

ГЛАВА 1. ЧТО ТАКОЕ ИСКУССТВО: ИНСТИТУЦИОНАЛЬНЫЙ АНАЛИЗ

Пер. Сергея Дзикевича / Россия

Обзоры

ЕВРОПЕЙСКИЙ СИМВОЛИЗМ В ФУНДАМЕНТАЛЬНОМ АНАЛИЗЕ

(Символизм – новые ракурсы / Ответственный редактор и составитель И.Е.Светлов. М.: Канон-плюс, 2017)

Сергей Дзикевич / Россия

Практики

НИНА САЙМОН. ПАРТИЦИПАТОРНЫЙ МУЗЕЙ

Алёна Григораш / Россия

(Полный текст на русском языке и справочные данные на английском языке)

READ IN THIS ISSUE

Theory

THE MIMETIC CREATION OF THE IMAGINARY

Christoph Wulf / Germany

(Full text in English and Russian languages)

NATURE OF THE AESTHETIC AND BECOMING OF ART

Marat Afasizhev / Russia

(Full text in Russian with information in English)

History

AESTHETICS AFTER DEBATES ABOUT MODERNISM AND POSTMODERNISM

Elena Bogatyreva / Russia

(Full text in Russian with information in English)

Translations

GEORGE DICKIE.

ART AND THE AESTHETIC: AN INSTITUTIONAL ANALYSIS

CHAPTER 1. WHAT IS ART: AN INSTITUTIONAL ANALYSIS

Translated into Russian by Sergey Dzkevich

Reviews

SYMBOLISM IN FUNDAMENTAL ANALYSIS

(Symbolism – New Perspectives / Ed. by I.E.Svetlov. Moscow: Kanon-Plus, 2017)

Sergey Dzikevich / Russia

Practices

NINA SIMON. PARTICIPATORY MUSEUM. REWIEW

Alyona Grigorash / Russia

(Full text in Russian with information in English)

Редакционная статья

Настоящим номером редакционная коллегия начинает выпуск теоретического альманаха «Aesthetica Universalis (Всеобщая эстетика)», который будет издаваться ежеквартально в печатном и в электронном вариантах с последующим выходом издания в крупнейшие системы индексирования.

Теоретический альманах «Aesthetica Universalis», который начинает издавать кафедра эстетики философского факультета МГУ имени М.В.Ломоносова, старейшая профильная институция в нашей стране, планируется как уникальное специализированное издание по эстетической проблематике, предназначенное для исследователей, преподавателей и одновременно для широкой аудитории. В число членов редакционного совета, редакционной коллегии и штатных рецензентов вошли авторитетные российские и зарубежные специалисты. Важнейшей задачей журнала является координация теоретических публикаций во всех областях эстетического знания, консолидация интеллектуальных усилий российских эстетиков различных институций, регионов и исследовательских направлений.

Редколлегия журнала надеется, что журнал «Aesthetica Universalis», при Вашем заинтересованном и деятельном участии, станет регулярным изданием с интересными и глубокими статьями по различным направлениям эстетических исследований и формам эстетических практик. В журнале предполагаются следующие тематические рубрики: ТЕОРИЯ (актуальные проблемы эстетической теории); ИСТОРИЯ (историко-эстетические исследования); ПЕРЕВОДЫ (введение в русскоязычный оборот ранее непереведенных источников); ОБЗОРЫ (рецензии на публикации, диссертации и дискуссии по эстетике); ПРАКТИКА (описание эстетического опыта во всех проявлениях).

Рукопись подается на русском или английском языке c переводом части аппарата.

Структура рукописи: имя и фамилия автора (на русском или английском); аффилиация автора (на русском или английском); город, страна, адрес электронной почты; название статьи (на русском и английском); аннотация объемом 200—300 слов (на каждом языке); ключевые слова (на русском и английском, по 5—7 слов на каждом языке); – текст статьи (на русском или английском); список литературы; ссылки оформляются в Гарвардском стиле.

Адрес редакции: aestheticauniversalis@gmail.com

СЕРГЕЙ ДЗИКЕВИЧ,

главный редактор Aesthetica Universalis

Editorial

With this issue we start publishing Aesthetica Universalis, the theoretical journal established by Department of Aesthetics at Philosophy Faculty of Lomonosov Moscow State University. We suppose our journal to be included into largest international data bases.

The content of every issue will be divided into the following sections: THEORY (the aesthetic field from contemporary theoretical points of view); HISTORY (appearance, transformations and adventures of aesthetic ideas in different times and within different cultures); TRANSLATIONS (significant aesthetic sources translated into Russian); REVIEWS (expositions of remarkable publications, dissertations and conferences on aesthetics); PRACTICES (descriptions of aesthetic experience of different kinds).

Our journal is bilingual (English and Russian), it means that all texts will have this quality in their structure. If you write in English you do your work the main part of your work (your name, your affiliation, the title, annotation, key words, the very text body, references) in this language but after these mentioned parts you add Russian details of apparatus (the name, the title, annotation and key words). If you write in Russian you do the same job but vice-versa. Your text must be of no less than 20000 and no more than 40000 characters including spaces, English and Russian parts in total.

Your text must be organized in the following order:

1. You must put your name and your affiliation before your text in the language of the main part of your publication, and e-mail.

2. Then you put the title in the same language.

3. Then the annotation in the same language follows, it must consist of 200—300 words.

4. Then you put the key words (7—10 ones) in the same language.

5. Then references in the language of the main text are going. Our journal supports Harvard style of references.

6. Then you put annotation in the language of translation (200—300 words). Than you put the key words in the language of translation.

Your file must be saved in Rich Text Format (rtf), font Book Antiqua, 12 for main the main part of the article (the name, the title, the body of the text) and Book Antiqua, 10 for the apparatus (annotations, key words, references). Please, make margins as in this letter and paragraphs as in the model that is following.

Editorial e-mail:

aestheticauniversalis@gmail.com

SERGEY DZIKEVICH,

Aesthetica Universalis Editor-in-Chief

THEORY / ТЕОРИЯ

Christoph Wulf¹

THE MIMETIC CREATION OF THE IMAGINARY. ANTHROPOLOGICAL PREREQUISITES OF MIMETIC PROCESSES

Abstract

Young children learn to make sense of the world through mimetic processes. These processes are focused to begin with on their parents, brothers and sisters and people they know well. Young children want to become like these persons. They are driven by the desire to become like them, which will mean that they belong and are part of them and their world. Young children, and indeed humans in general are social beings. They, more than all non-human primates, are social beings who cannot survive without the Other. In mimetic processes the outside world becomes the inner world and the inner world becomes the outside world. The imaginary is developed and the imaginary develops ways of relating to the outside world. In a mimetic loop, this in turn affects the inner world of the imaginary. These processes are sensory and governed by desire. All the senses are involved which means that the imaginary has multiple layers. Since there is an intermingling of images, emotions and language, these processes are rooted in the body and at the same time transcend the body as they become part of the imaginary. Human beings create images of themselves in all cultures and historical periods. They need these images to understand themselves and their relationship to other human beings and to develop social relations and communities. Images of the human being are designs and projections of the human being and his or her relationship to other people and to the world. They are formed to visualize representations of individuals or aspects of them. They arise when we communicate about ourselves. They support us to live with diversities and to develop similarities and feelings of belonging with other people. They are the result of complex anthropological processes, in which social and cultural power structures play an important role.

Key words

Mimesis, images, the imaginary.

Young children learn to make sense of the world through mimetic processes. These processes are focussed to begin with on their parents, brothers and sisters and people they know well. Young children want to become like these persons. They are driven by the desire to become like them, which will mean that they belong and are part of them and their world. Young children, and indeed humans in general are social beings. They, more than all non-human primates, are social beings who cannot survive without the Other. There are several anthropological conditions behind this.

One of these is neoteny, or the fact that human beings are born at an embryonic stage in their development. In other words human beings are born unfinished or incomplete. Their development has to take place once their life has started, and for this to happen they need people who are close to them, people they desire and who they want to be like. Unlike other non-human primates and animals, children are not governed by their instincts. They are equipped only with residual instincts which are not strong enough for them to be able to survive if they are not kept alive by the people close to them.

We can see this clearly if we compare a young child to a foal. A foal is capable of living just a few hours after its birth, whereas it takes young human beings years to reach that stage. Neoteny and the decrease in the instincts are inextricably linked. As Philosophical Anthropology has also indicated, this explains why human beings are able to grasp the «suchness» (Sosein) of phenomena, in other words the world, whereas animals are only able to perceive an environment determined by their instincts (Wulf 2013a, chap. 2)

It is through mimetic processes that children make their early discoveries of the world. It is not only that children try to become like other people whom they desire. It is also their discovery of the world that is mimetic. These early processes of perceiving the world that are of such central importance in the development of the imaginary, are frequently mimetic. In other words, at a very early stage young children develop an active relationship to the world. They adopt relationships to objects which are conveyed to them largely by the people whom they desire to emulate. For example children follow adults’ movements when adults give them a bottle filled with tea. They perceive the objects «bottle» and «tea» and the movement of the person they love giving them something to drink. As children mimetically appropriate the way the adults they love give them the tea, they feel and appropriate both the act of giving the tea and also the warmth and caring this expresses, over and above the act of tea giving. As children appropriate the action there is an interplay between the object that quenches their thirst (the bottle) and the child’s appropriation of the emotional aspect of the action, the caring. Young children perceive these processes at an early age, and at this point it is the receptive aspect that is dominant. It is the adults who perform the actions and the children who perceive them. A few months later this changes and the active side of perception becomes more important. A child’s perception of the world is socially transmitted very early on. Since the medium for this is culture, the child becomes «encultured» while very young. This happens via the movements of persons close to the child. These movements convey meanings, even if these are not yet conveyed in words. Children understand the gesture of someone giving them tea (Wulf, and Fischer-Lichte 2010). It contains a meaning, even though this meaning is not articulated verbally. This is because gestures, as non-verbal acts, still convey meaning. What conveys the meaning here is the movement of the body, driven by the senses, which children perceive at a very early age and then repeat, also very early on, in mimetic processes (Gebauer, and Wulf 2018).

It is in mimetic processes that children discover the sense of gestural actions, a sense that is implicit and often does not even need to be conveyed because it is has already been conveyed by the body. Such gestural actions form part of our vast silent knowledge, which is so very important in human life but which is often accorded little value in comparison with scientific knowledge which society reveres (Kraus, Budde, Hietzge, and Wulf 2017). Ryle clearly identified the different nature of the knowledge that manifests itself in actions of the body in his distinction between «knowing how» and «knowing that» (Ryle 1990). Learning to ride a bike is a good illustration of this. I can read a whole treatise about what you have to do when riding a bike, but it will be of very little help to me when learning. Learning to ride a bike does not involve «knowing that» but «knowing how». I need to be able to do it, and have to learn it practically, by using my body. There is no other way I can acquire this knowledge, that is far more an ability. Here too, learning to ride a bike is the result of mimetic processes, processes that have to relate to other people but above all to the movements of our own bodies. This is a kind of mimesis of ourselves where we develop a mimetic relationship to our own behaviour in order to improve it.

Now to return to the mimetic processes that take place in young children, by means of which they develop their imaginary. Even before they reach the age of one, they are able to understand the intentions of the people close to them. If someone points at something, for example, then they follow the gesture of pointing, not stopping at the finger itself, but grasping that the aim of the pointing is an object and not the finger itself. (Tomasello 1999). It is already apparent in one year olds that they are beginning to use mimetic processes to make sense of the world and gradually transform it into their imaginary. Through mimetic processes the outside world becomes their inner world. As non-verbal actions addressed by subjects towards objects, gestures play an important role in conveying emotional caring and attachment. This is because they are demonstrative and at the same time directed towards the other person. In a mimetic process they convey a positive social relationship and a relationship to the objects of a cultural world. Both of these become absorbed into a child’s imaginary in the mimetic process, resulting in a complex interlinking of a cultural object (a bottle), the adult’s act of caring and the meaning of this interplay for the child.

In his autobiography, «Berlin Childhood around 1900», Walter Benjamin (2006) illustrated how children incorporate their cultural environments in processes of assimilation. In the course of these processes, children assimilate aspects of the parental home, such as the rooms, particular corners, objects and atmospheres. They are incorporated as «imprints» of the images and stored in the child’s imaginary world, where they are subsequently transformed into new images and memories that help the child gain access to other cultural worlds. Culture is handed on by means of these processes of incorporating and making sense of cultural products. The mimetic ability to transform the external material world into images, transferring them into our internal worlds of images and making them accessible to others enables individuals to develop their imaginary and to actively shape cultural realities (Gebauer, and Wulf 1998, 2018; Wulf 2002; Wulf, and Zirfas 2014).

Even at the age of one, children develop a considerable ability, though the fact that they are very active, to absorb the world around them in mimetic processes. The ability of a child’s body to move around plays an important role in this. This physical moving enables them to alter their relationship to objects in the outside world. Their perspective on the world changes as they move. This applies to the corners where the objects are perceived and even more to the changing bodily encounters with the world. The world is touched by the child’s hands and often by the child’s whole body. As they gradually feel their way around the world children experience two things. One is the active child’s experience of touching the objects. But it is also the discovery that, through the act of touching, the world itself replies. Children now feel the differences in material objects and at the same time experience the world outside them. This dual experience of touching objects and being touched by them is of central importance in the development of the very first elements of a sense of a child’s identity. The child now has the dual experience of being active and passive at the same time, an experience which characterises mimetic processes. Children touch the world and are touched back by it. This becomes a cyclical process of mutual discovery, and I cannot overstate how important this is for the development of the child’s imaginary.

In mimetic processes the outside world becomes the inner world and the inner world becomes the outside world. The imaginary is developed and the imaginary develops ways of relating to the outside world. Again in a mimetic loop, this in turn affects the inner world of the imaginary. These processes are sensory and governed by desire. All the senses are involved which means that the imaginary has multiple layers. Since there is an intermingling of images, emotions and language, these processes are rooted in the body and at the same time transcend the body as they become part of the imaginary (Wulf 2014; Hüppauf, and Wulf 2009; Paragrana 2016).

As we read works of literature, it is mimetic processes that bring to life an assemblage of non-sensory words into sensory ideas and emotions and give them meaning. (Benjamin 1980a, 1980b). It is the same with other products of culture that also require mimetic processes for them to come alive. Such processes are particularly important in the transfer of the cultural imaginary from one generation to the next, since these processes require a metamorphosis to keep forms of living, knowledge, art or technology alive. As mimetic processes are not simply methods of copying or producing worlds that have already been symbolically interpreted but also consist in our taking and then incorporating «impressions» of these worlds, these mimetic relationships always contain creative aspects which alter the original worlds. This creates a cultural dynamism between generations and cultures which constantly gives rise to new things.