Post Hoc Rationalization
The natural consequence of mimetic violence is post hoc rationalization, the widespread acceptance and approval of the scapegoat and the scapegoating mechanism used. This act of rationalization is restorative. By justifying the violence imputed to the scapegoat, society washes its hands clean of ‘guilt’ in the matter. For time violence simmers. Balance is restored.
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.
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.
René Girard’s CBC interview – David Cayley
Since the beginning of time, humanity has been in constant conflict due to the mimetic nature of desire. In this televised interview, IDEAS producer David Cayley speaks with René Girard about the historical and biblical aspects of mimetic theory, scapegoating, and violence, from Cain and Abel through examples from contemporary literature. With the revelation of mimetic desire and its consequences, Girard hopes to protect humanity from the escalation of violence that is inevitable if the mimetic conflict is not recognized and ultimately renounced. Watch David Cayley’s incredible Interview with René Girard
Scapegoating at Çatalhöyük – René Girard
In 2008, René Girard gave a keynote lecture at the Colloquium on Violence and Religion about how the dynamics of mimetic desire were playing out thousands of years ago. With a focus on what he called “Scapegoating at Çatalhöyük”, he analyzes the rituals that are contained in humanity’s earliest forms of artwork. Çatalhöyük was a large Neolithic and Chalcolithic proto-city settlement in southern Anatolia, which existed from approximately 7500 BC to 5700 BC. Watch Scapegoating at Çatalhöyük
Things Hidden Since The Foundation of the World: Book Launch
Why is human violence the much-neglected key to understanding human emergence and development? How does it differ from animal violence? How was it controlled by the victimary or scapegoat mechanism? How does this stabilize human communities and lead to the creation of natural or archaic religion (‘the sacred’); and then to the development of our culture as a whole? Watch Things Hidden Since The Foundation of the World: Book Launch
Violence
Violence in mimetic theory is not a discrete event or even an external action. Violence is the consequence of a relationship—always a relationship—and never a “lone-wolf” or “random act”. While the victims may be random, the violence is always the result of a mimetic process that unfolds with its own scandals, conflict, and resentment long before things turn violent. In a mimetic rivalry, violence tends to be the natural result: when two parties are caught up in a dangerous dance of mimetic reciprocation, a conflict must escalate until to the point where there is eventually violence. Many times, the violence is done to a scapegoat, by means of the scapegoat mechanism.
Scapegoat
A person, group, or thing that a community chooses—through a mimetically-driven process— to expel or eliminate in the midst of a mimetic crisis in order to bring about a resolution. The scapegoat absorbs all of the mimetic tension and violence, which had previously been undirected and chaotic, onto itself.