The Fyre Festival and Violent Mimesis
On April 27, 2017, the first attendees of the now-infamous Fyre Festival landed in the Bahamas. They expected a weekend of luxury and pampering, and to potentially rub shoulders with Instagram influencers such as Kendall Jenner and Hailey Baldwin. Instead, they were met with chaos. There were no luxury hotels or gourmet meals, just Lord of the Flies-style chaos. The festival quickly became an online joke under the hashtag #dumpsterfyre. It has since been the subject of two documentaries and numerous columns. The crazy thing about the Fyre Festival is that it was never going to work. The organizers never had enough money, experience or time to pull off an event of the magnitude they had promised. Yet over 5,000 people signed up after seeing their favorite models and influencers post about it. Why would rational adults such a thing? The answer: Mimesis. What is mimesis? Mimesis comes from the Greek word mīmeisthai, “to imitate”. Mimetic theory is a theory that explains human desire, and ultimately human behavior, with a very simple and very paradigm breaking observation: desire may feel like it comes from some objective place deep inside of us- but that is actually not true. We desire what we desire because we are imitating someone else who desired that first. René Girard is the founder of mimetic theory. He made his breakthrough after a break-up, when he realized that the more his ex dated, the more he desired her. He realized that her desire for him affected his desire for her, as did her view of herself. When she viewed herself as someone desirable to date, he wanted to date her. And thus the mimetic theory was born. Where is mimesis in my life The short answer is: Everywhere. The longer answer is that you are born with certain biological urges, but not necessarily desire. You eat, drink, seek shelter, etc because your body tells you to. However, everything else you want, you’ve learned to want through a process that Girard named, “mimesis.” This started when you were a baby. You didn’t have a biological urge to develop language; you began to speak because you heard your parents speaking. In fact, you imitated everything they did, from facial expressions to eye movements to words they didn’t mean to teach you when they stubbed their toe. Babies are even more obvious. Pre-verbal children will spend the months before they begin speaking imitating others’ noises until they develop language. They also will imitate facial movements, and even follow their parent’s gaze. This is because we are hard-wired to learn what we want from others. Want to put this to the test? Anyone who has ever spent time with multiple children and singular toy should recognize mimesis at work. Say a doll with no clothes and ratty hair is lying on the ground, ignored. If a parent picks it up and begins to act as though they are having fun with it, the children are likely to drop whatever they are holding and demand a turn with the doll. Why should I care about this? Two reasons, really. The first is that it helps us to know ourselves. Mimesis helps us understand our moral stances, spousal requirements, dreams, and so much more. If we understand that our desires come from who we are imitating, we can influence our desires by choosing different models. This gives us self-knowledge and helps us become better versions of ourselves. But it also helps us with a darker, deeply urgent problem that we all face. Mimesis doesn’t just explain desire. It explains violence. Think about it. If you imitate other people’s desires, you are likely to be drawn into rivalries with them, the same way little children will fight for the same toy, even if there are plenty of other toys in the room. Humans are incredibly prone to violence, and this shows up in our personal lives just as much as it does in our political arena. If you want to stop fighting with your partner, or repair relationships with family, or find ways out of what might feel like impossible conflicts in business, the insights of Rene Girard about mimesis, scapegoating, and violence can help you negate the conflict. To learn more about how to click here to read more: Learn more about Mimesis
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.