‘Image Games’: Political Imagology and the Mimicry of Power

Abstract

This chapter exemplifies the arguably most familiar form of an image game, the concept of parody, which is synonymous with the concept of power. The most obvious form of an image game is the mimicking of group leader behavior by subordinated group members - the mimicry of power, which Heinrich Mann famously displayed in The Patrioteer . The correlation of performance and politics particularly comes into focus when political consequences are grave; the scholar's attention then focuses on the causes and the background of these conflicts. Political reality is excused a priori of the need to appear for real, and the reason for this is that political struggle as such is structurally identical with parody. Parody is nothing but the antagonistic expression of this tension of appearance and non-appearance, of reading and interpretation, of abstraction and representation. Keywords:antagonistic expression; concept of power; image game; mimicry of power; parody; political reality