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.
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.
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.
Profane
Rene Girard believed that at the heart of all human culture was the distinction between the profane and the sacred. Generally, these terms describe the two different kinds of violence that result from mimetic desire. Profane violence is arbitrary, disordered, and chaotic. On the contrary, sacred violence, such as sacrifices, rituals, and religion, attempt to stem profane violence from spreading. Sacred violence shapes and orders profane violence by establishing a founding myth and related rituals, thereby minimizing the adverse effects.
State of Chaos
Girardian chaos is the state of a society in which mimetic desire has created rivalries and tension that have disrupted the social fabric to the point of breaking. Societies in a state of chaos look for something to bring order, and that something is often the scapegoating mechanism. Humans always seek to bring order out of chaos, yet Girard’s theory posits that it is by their own mimetic desires leading to rivalries that create the chaos in the first place. The scapegoating mechanism works, in part, because people never attribute the cause of the chaos to themselves but rather to some entity in the group or outside of the group that they can pin the blame on. This allows them to avoid dealing with the problems of desire that are internal.
Mimetic Crisis
When mimetic desire has spread through a community (always in Freshmanistan) leading to tension and rivalries that change rapidly and lack a clear direction, resulting in chaos that threatens to tear the community apart socially. A mimetic crisis is the part of mimetic theory that most closely dialogues with the crowd (or mob) psychology branch of social psychology, proposing that the essential feature of a crowd in a mimetic crisis is the elimination of difference (mobs tend toward sameness) due to the mimetic nature of desire. The crisis of sameness that ensues leads the mob to notice and amplify differences to the maximum degree which, if not diffused, activates the scapegoat mechanism.
Scapegoat Mechanism
According to Girard, the process by which humans have historically saved themselves from mimetic crises by immolating or expelling a scapegoat. The first time the scapegoat mechanism is employed, it happens mimetically and spontaneously. After that, it is reenacted in ritual fashion in a way that recreates and resolves the original crisis. Bullfighting is one of many examples of a highly elaborate social ritual which re-creates danger and then sacrifices something to put an end to the danger. By participating in the spectacle, each person watching in the bullfighting arena has some of the feelings of danger mimetically transmitted to them and then relieved in the ritual killing, approximating what happens to a community in a mimetic crisis.