Mimesis

Submission to the spell of a performer involving active emotional identification with a speaker or a chorus in a dramatic setting. Through this process knowledge is transmitted at a directly experiential level that may be both relaxing and erotic. Learning occurs at the level of the body without separate intellectual analysis, commenting on the world at setting it at a distance. The information presented may be in poetic form encouraging a form of autohypnosis through which it was memorized. Such performances have an absorbing, repetitive, trance-like aspect. Understanding is thus achieved through absorption and loss of psychic distance. Such participation or identification is highly sensuous in nature. It is a mode of knowing that cannot be intellectually refuted because of its immediate, visceral quality.