Bramstrup 2009
Basic Context
The concept of knowledge sharing is highly developed at Bramstrup. Working within the aesthetically spectacular surroundings of a traditional farming estate (now a site for cutting-edge agricultural research), we combine performing arts with philosophical inquiry and leadership research in a special mix that has created a significant attraction among artists, managers, and business school researchers since 2003.
Musical performance serves as a laboratory for developing a new sensitivity in relation to the tactile event. This year will focus on an overall understanding of the five senses and their role in achieving novelty and recognizing the potential of emerging ideas.
The Reenchantment of Mimesis
A Joint venture by Centre of Art and Leadership, CBS, Center of Art and Science, SDU, and Trøndelag Research and Development.
Art has ever since Plato and Aristotle been conceived of through the concept of mimesis. But the first non-critical treatment of it in the Poetics of Aristotle does not see it as pure imitation. It is always transformative re-creation. Naturalism is not only one prototypical version of mimesis, it does not empty its essence. Everybody knows that even the photographically concise reproduction in painting does not reproduce. The medium does not allow for it, because of the brush, and because of the always artificial light.
The master pieces of impressionism are magic transformations conjuring up an ultra-real reality by technically well prepared exploitations of the seeing of seeing.
Non-figurative painting only imitates its own phantasm, following processes directed more by the emerging motif than by the painter.
Music has this same character, transferring the effort of mimesis to the listener – no one needs to visualize the waves when hearing the piece of Debussy with this same title.
Also epic, poetry and even drama, has got this deeply rooted relation to the phantasm, only persuading the reader and the spectator to accept conjectures of reality, the validity of which depends of the capacity of the artist to deceive. The narrative is an informative and convincing lie, trapping us in its fictive worlds.
Behind this enchanting power of art lies the principle of translocutionarity. This principle captures the epistemological fact that we do not know what we mean until we hear us self saying it. But it also goes for action: We do not know properly what we are doing, and hence, what we can do, before we are doing it.
In this is contained a strong mechanism of feed-back: To experience is to imitate one’s own attention, and to think is to imitate one’s own speech.
Through the gap, or even mental abyss, infolded in the effort to overcome it, these acts reveal the secret of creativity.
The feed-back from the instrument is the secret of music, like the feed-back from the canvas or the clay is the secret of the plastic arts, and the feed-back from the paper or the screen is the secret of writing. It is exactly from this infinitely short interval before the feed-back emerges, the “legonta sigan”, “the silence of speech”, that the new emerges.
In these processes the senses combine in creating tacit syntheses, projecting and exposing their secret work into a “tode ti”, into a “haecceitas”, and this “ergon”, this epiphany of the creative process as a singular or unique product, reveals the inner, chiastic relations between body, mind and event lead by language and manual “techne”. The product is always an echo of what the combined efforts of the senses reveal about the world, and this is the true core of mimesis: a re-bodied, “re-noticed” realm of appearance.
But mimesis is also a crucial concept for understanding social relations and their historical development. Adorno emphasized, in line with Plato´s suspicion of the common sense slavery of imitation, the utopian power of art through its capacity to express nothing but itself, i.e. the reality of the work, and thus defying the practical or concrete generalization of the market where values are expressed. Hence, mimesis can be understood as totally non-naturalist and totally non-functionalist, non-strategic, and non-pragmatic. Art relieves the possibility of the virtual.
To René Girard mimesis is the secret of desire, because its object is created by the fact that it belongs to the other. The goal of desire then, is possession of products defined by dominating categories of desired objects. Hence, mimesis can explain the role of status in society.
But mimesis is also a crucial mechanism in ethical development and in identity formation. The concept of values, and hence, leadership virtues, and organizational values, can be conceived through a positive mimesis of behavior, event-handling, and individual integrity.
Social mimesis is promoted by myths, tales, and stories, and it is thus co-created by art.
We shall investigate the possibilities of the revival of mimesis as a concept which is able to surmount the constructionist implications inherent in its recent interpretations in order to emphasize mimesis as the capacity to unify with becoming.
Register
Conference fee: 6.000 DKK. (including meals and tickets for performances)
Reduced fee for artists, students and researchers: 2.200 DKK
Sign up for the conference
Contact:
Center for Art & Leadership,
Kathrine Winge Müller
E-mail: kwm.lpf@cbs.dk