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(2012) Television and the moral imaginary, Dordrecht, Springer.
I wonder whether Aristotle would have enjoyed watching as much television as many people in modern societies do. 1 He tells us that the arts give pleasure to people through mimesis: "Imitation comes naturally to human beings from childhood (and in this they differ from other animals, i.e. in having a strong propensity to imitation and in learning their earliest lessons through imitation); so does the universal pleasure in imitations' (Aristotle 1996: 6). He was writing about poetry and drama, but television is today the medium that mimetically reproduces the life that humans directly experience as actuality and as fiction. The arts (including comedy, music and drama), the telling of history, the reporting of news and spectacles such as sports events are all mimetic forms that appear on television and give pleasure. Mimesis is not the same as a "copying' or a "mirroring' actual behaviour; it is always a representation. Even the most detailed and accurate audiovisual representation of live, actual events can never be direct duplicates of the events themselves, which, however faithfully captured, lose their smell, feel, depth and all-around-ness. Mimesis is a process in which something of "reality' is always lost, and something is always added by the intervention of human action, and television's increasing capacity to appear to represent the real does not stop it from being mimetic.
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Full citation:
Dant, T. (2012). Introduction – the small screen and morality, in Television and the moral imaginary, Dordrecht, Springer, pp. 1-20.
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