Michel Foucault on Mimesis

Here is how French philosopher Michel Foucault describes what the Horkheimer/Adorno see as a pre-modern age of mimesis (which Foucault calls resemblance):

Up to the end of the sixteenth century, resemblance played a constructive role in the knowledge of Western culture. It was resemblance that largely guided exegesis and the interpretation of texts; it was resemblance that organized the play of symbols, made possible knowledge of things visible and invisible, and controlled the art of representing them. The universe was folded in upon itself: the earth echoing the sky, faces seeing themselves reflected in the stars, and plants holding within their stems the secrets that were of use to man. Painting imitated space. And representation--whether in the service of pleasure or knowledge--was posited as a form of repetition: the theatre of life or the mirror of nature, that was the claim made by all language, its manner of declaring its existence and of formulating it right of speech.

--Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (NY: Vintage, 1970), p. 17