Inherent Scarcity
Mimetic rivalries are fought over objects that are scarce. Often these objects are metaphysical and include such things as honor, power, and prestige, which are perceivably limited. Presumably, if there was enough of these objects to go around, mimesis would be defused. However, mimetic theory challenges the classical economic assumption that an object’s scarcity creates competition for it. It suggests instead that the object’s scarcity is the result of the mimetic desire for it.
Acquisitive Mimesis
Acquisitive mimesis describes the transfer of desires from one person to another. In triangular, or mimetic desire, a mediator exists between the person desiring and the object being desired. These mediator models how to desire and thus passes on the desire. Depending on how far removed the mediator is from the subject, the desire can be acquired simply through mediation, or it can lead to mimetic rivalry, where the two persons each model and acquire desire from the other. The transfer of desires is not a conscious or deliberate decision – rather, it can happen spontaneously. For this reason, acquisitive mimesis is considered contagious.
Triangular Desire
Mimetic desire involves a subject (the person desiring), an object (the thing being desired), and a mediator (the person modeling desire) between the two. These three points, when mapped, form a triangle. Hence triangular desire. Rene Girard’s insight into the shape of desire radically transformed the previously held assumption that desire is strictly horizontal, occurring like a straight line between subject and object. By studying the great works of literature, Girard discovered that human desire is fundamentally imitative: people learn how to desire through others. This discovery forms the basis of mimetic theory.
Shared Ignorance
This blog by Sherwood “Woody” Belangia is a preparation for his book on Plato’s Republic, which will be what he calls a “defective reading” of the text. By defective he means that his study of the text is not actually about the text but about his real object of interest (and, in his opinion’s, Plato’s) which is some “third” object that the text is referring to. Not the Republic itself, but whatever Plato is trying to tell us by talking about the Republic. Belangia adopts what he calls questioning desire. “Desire is always defective in that it wants what it doesn’t yet have,” he writes. This website contains a well-written glossary of key terms in mimetic theory. Visit Shared Ignorance
Imitation
Taking someone or something else as a model for action. Children are experts at imitation; adults usually mask it. Imitation is the positive force driving childhood development, adult learning, and the acquisition of virtue. Imitation is neutral—we can either imitate positively (what I refer to as “emulation”) or negatively. The value of imitation is a function of both the model being imitated (where the model stands in relation to you and the quality of that model’s example) and the quality of imitation (rivalrous or non-rivalrous). Imitation is different than mimesis, which is hidden, masked, disguised–the adult version of childhood imitation.
Mimetic Desire in the Art Market: Mona Lisa
What art feuds reveal about human desire The art world has a fetish for conspiracy. Take a casual sweep of the news over a given year and you will turn up any number of stories about stolen masterpieces, disputed provenances, and multi-million-dollar black-market auctions. Art itches for intrigue and the latest installment involve the Mona Lisa and a look-alike painting called the ‘Islesworth Mona Lisa.’ According to CNN, the ‘Islesworth Mona Lisa’, which experts have known about for years, had been quietly touring world galleries until an anonymous claimant made a ‘grab’ for quarter ownership, thus inciting a sudden, heated scrum for its possession. Reading the account of the ‘Islesworth’ is like reading the opening chapter of a mystery novel, with its multi-layered histories of buyers and sellers, claimants and counterclaimants, aristocrats and feuding experts. It’s quite racy stuff. But what is most fascinating about the whole account is that the ongoing debate not principally about the art, but the ownership of the art. That’s right: put aside questions about the canvas and the oil and sfumato. This feud is simply a human drama about human desire. And like all high stakes art conquests, this one follows the stages of Rene Girard’s mimetic theory like a script. In the first stage of mimetic theory, called mimetic desire, an object is desired not in and of itself (sorry, Leonardo), but because someone else wants it. Case in point: there was no quibble about the Islesworth Mona Lisa until the anonymous someone made a grab for it. The burst of desire triggered more desire. Then everyone was making a grab for it. In the second stage of mimetic theory, mimetic desire leads to mimetic rivalry, where two sides fight over the same thing. It’s an important distinction that the two sides fight over sameness, no difference because it is common for people locked in mimetic rivalry to think they actually want different things. For example, one side claims to want the Islesworth in order to share it more broadly with the world. The other side says they want it to prevent it from falling into the hands of hucksters. But regardless of motives, both sides really want the same thing: ownership. The second thing to note in mimetic rivalry is that the scarcer the object, the fiercer the rivalry – which in this situation (ownership of a single painting), increases the violence of the feud. Finally, mimetic rivalry gives way to scapegoating. Scapegoating is the process of unknowingly choosing something or someone (the scapegoat) to assume the blame for the contention. This scapegoating mechanism works by disabusing both sides of the rivalry and establishing a sense of stability, or quasi-peace. This raises an interesting question: who or what is the scapegoat in the Islesworth Mona Lisa trial? The claimant who made the first grab? Are the various experts yelling back and forth? The painting itself? To find a scapegoat, go to the center of the furnace, where the fire’s hottest. And what do we find: a legal ‘battle’ being ‘waged’. Could the law itself be the scapegoat? Or lawyers trying to appease their feuding clients? Maybe the Mona Lisa knows. Maybe that’s why she’s smiling.
Mimesis Versus Imitation
Mimesis is a funny word. It would make Strunk & White (who taught us never to use unnecessary or overly complicated words) cringe. So why use it? It turns out there’s a good reason Quite simply, mimesis is not the same as imitation. It refers to something far more common, far more powerful, and far more hidden. The Etymology of Mimesis Mimesis comes from the Greek word mīmeisthai, which means “to imitate.” But the reason that we use the fancy, Greek-derived word “mimesis” rather than “imitation”—and why it’s mimetic theory, and the Mimetic Summit, not imitation theory or the Imitation Summit (who would want to go to that?)—is because the English word “imitation” doesn’t capture the essence of one very strange aspect of human behavior. An Example of Mimesis Imagine you let twenty kindergartners loose in a classroom full of toys and tell them to go have at it. You tell them to play until their hearts are content. There are not only enough toys for every kid—there are 10 times the amount of times as there are kids. 200 toys. Duplicates of many. Scattered all over the room. What happens? Ask any teacher (or parent, for that matter). One child takes a casual interest in a toy. This arouses the interest of a second child. The second child’s interest in the toy awakens a stronger desire for it in the first child, which awakens a stronger desire for it in the second child as she sees how tightly he’s clinging to it. Meanwhile, three versions of the same toy lying on the floor beyond her. It’s not long before other kids begin to be interested in the toy. Soon three of them have their paws on it, trying to yank it away from the others and possess it for themselves. But ask any of the kids who wanted it first, and they will always tell you that it was them. “I had it first!” says the first kid. Sure, he had it. But did he really want it? “But I wanted to play with it first!” protests the second child, unaware that she wouldn’t have given it a second thought had she not noticed it in the hands of the first girl, with the pretty red bow in her hair. (If only she had that toy, maybe she’d look as cute and happy as that girl!) None of the kids—and none the adults in the room—will be able to locate the first moment of desire for the toy—because there is none. Desire, it turns out, is social. The toy that the kids were fighting over didn’t stir up any desire at all; it was the other children who did. And none of them, individually, generated this desire. It was the result of a complex process of imitation. Actually, of mimesis. The Relevance of Mimesis It was Girard who, beginning in the 1960s, began to see the importance of imitation to explain a much larger proportion of human behavior than was ever imagined. While Plato and Aristotle and their heirs confined imitation to behaviors and words and external “things”, Girard realized that human powers of imitation extend into the very core of our beings—to what we desire and to how we form our identities. Mimesis, then, is a constituent part of human nature. In a world in which the role of imitation has been downplayed and relegated to something that should be avoided at all cost (Silicon Valley exemplifies this attitude), Girard’s theory was radical, provocative, and dangerous. That’s because the very people who despise imitation and flee from it at all costs are themselves engaged in the deepest and most hidden forms of imitation—a kind of imitation that has been driven into the “underground,” where it is better known as mimesis. It’s an underground hell from which many people are trying to escape.
Individuality
Individual psychology is the first major attempt to formally apply mimetic theory to psychology. It rests on the notion of individuality, first articulated by the psychologist Jean-Michel Oughourlian, to describe the way that human psychology can only be understood in the relation between individuals, or in the space between different human persons. The idea of psychology as an individual science is folly–humans are social creatures, and our psychology can’t be understood on a stand-alone basis without understanding how it is in relationship with other psychic elements around us. Individuality is the only neologism in mimetic theory. It is articulated most fully in Oughourlian’s book The Mimetic Brain.
Founding Murder
Every “culture” is founded on certain rituals, institutions, prohibitions, taboos—things that, according to Girard, are all predicated on a founding murder. Cultural rituals, institutions, prohibitions, and taboos are all thing devised to manage the spread of violence and, in essence, to re-enact the founding murder that was the foundation of culture through rituals rather than through actual blood sacrifice. The founding murder, in Girard’s view, is the foundation of culture. Every culture, whether it be a company culture or a nation’s culture, comes from some act of ritual sacrifice or violence that the culture tries to hide and re-act in its traditions.
Prohibitions and Taboos
Taboos are a proscribed set of actions, events, and phenomena that society deems unacceptable. These sorts of actions, such as incest, are unanimously acknowledged and avoided because they signal a fundamental threat to relationships, as well as the possibility of violence. In mimetic theory, taboos and prohibitions play a reconciling and pacifying role in the escalation of mimetic desire. Far from being empty superstitions, taboos, like forewarnings, are instituted by society to prevent mimetic rivalries from reaching the highest levels of violence, especially the sacrificial crisis. Because of their close association with the form Prohibited of violence they are meant to prevent, taboos often have a sinister connotation. They are feared as much as they are avoided. Rene Girard believed that the loss of taboos and prohibitions from societies could lead to unfortunate manifestations of violence.