Who would have thought that Stanford’s eminent French theorist René Girard would enter the empyrean of “coolness”? Neil Scott did. That’s who.
On Neil Scott’s Substack – “95 Theses on Cool, parts 0-17: From Miles Davis to René Girard via Red Scare podcast“ – the French theorist made the cut. #16 is René Girard, and I get a mention:
“… In Girard’s view, everything we desire, everything we think is cool, is learned through copying someone else. As Cynthia Haven, writes: “We live derivative lives. We envy and imitate others obsessively, unendingly, often ridiculously. ‘All desire is a desire for being,’ [Girard] said, and the being we long for becomes wrapped up in a person. That person, whether we like it or not, is our avatar of cool.”
Read the rest here. Want to know more about him, so you can be cool, too? Try Jerry Bowdler’s excellent 2015 article in Forbes, “René Girard: The ‘Einstein of the Human Sciences.'” (Note: the late Michel Serres tagged René Girard as “the Darwin of the Human Sciences,” but Einstein isn’t bad, either.) A longish excerpt, reprinted with his permission:
Girard saw it first in literary studies. While engaging in a close examination of several great novelists, (Proust, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, even Cervantes) Girard noticed that despite the consensus that the great novelists were ‘singular’, i.e. one of a kind, they actually had several powerfully unifying themes. Those themes were that human desire does not generally emerge from within us, but rather comes from some ‘other’. We naively imagine that we simply are who we are, and that we want what we want because we are who we are. However, the great novelists present us with an inconvenient truth – that we import our most powerful desires from imitating other people.
Girard gives the example of a young man who admires the world’s greatest pianist. He is drawn to the pianist, and therefore he is drawn to what the pianist is drawn to – great achievement in piano performance. The great man wanted to be the best piano player in the world, and he got what he wanted. The younger man wants to be like his hero. But at precisely that point, when the younger man most idolizes his hero, they also become rivals. To truly imitate the master, the student must become the greatest piano player in the world. The two want the same thing, a thing which there cannot be two of – the title “greatest.”
The first stage Girard calls ‘mimesis’ – imitation. Young man wants to be like great man. The second stage is ‘mimetic desire’ – young man wants what his master wants (to be the greatest). The third stage is called ‘mimetic rivalry’ – young man and master want the same unique object of desire, so they become enemies.
Once you become aware of this process, you see it everywhere: celebrity feuds, geopolitical rivalries, financial asset valuation bubbles, everywhere that people interact. It’s even there among the animals, especially in the form of sexual rivalry, or rivalry over food. The Bowyer dogs desire a chew toy more when it is desired by another dog.
The idea is revolutionary because it overturns what Girard calls ‘the romantic illusion’, the illusion which goes back at least as far as Rousseau, that humans can be authentic. The romantic illusion proclaims that we can throw aside cultural and societal norms to follow our inner desires, that we can and must (as a thousand schlocky movie characters tell us to do) follow our hearts. Girard says we can’t follow our hearts instead of the group, because without the imitated other we don’t have desires in our hearts. Certainly we have instinctual urges, but not the higher purposes which we describe as desires. We get those from others.
But there is a problem larger than the disappointment in realizing that the romantic illusion is false and that genuine ‘authentic’ autonomous desire is an illusion. The larger problem is that the rivalries of mimetic desire tend to spin out of control. Switching to another of Girard’s metaphors: if I love a woman and you admire me and I praise that woman to you, you will tend to be drawn to her as well. Shakespeare does this a lot – it is the basis of the Rape of Lucretia and of Midsummer Night’s Dream, for instance. So I love her and you imitate me and come to love her too. But the fact that you desire her makes me even more confident in my initial desire for her. I am confirmed. I was right to desire her: the proof is the desire which you have for her. This can stay contained in a little love triangle or it can expand into a square, or even a pentagon… which reminds me that all of this can take on a military significance: the object of desire can become a casus belli. As Peter Robinson said in Girard’s last public interview, “There is only one Helen of Troy.” Not that the object of desire in war is typically sexual, but there is not just only one Helen — there is also only one Hellespont, and as Russia and Turkey are all too aware, only one Black Sea.
This is a self-reinforcing mechanism. Mimetic desire increases the intensity of desire, and the intensity is also then imitated, and the imitation then sets off another round of desire. This often leads to physical clashes. Girard calls this stage ‘mimetic violence’.
When the process enters the violent phase, there is a subtle shift in the system. The original object of desire is no longer the point. No one cares that much about Helen anymore. Now it’s about fallen comrades: Hector must be avenged. Achilles’ cousin cannot be allowed to have died in vain. Agamemnon cannot go home empty-handed after so much shedding of Greek blood. The conflict itself takes on a life of its own. Menelaus cannot just go home and wed the second most beautiful girl in Greece after all those years of fighting. Ever have an argument with someone which quickly becomes an argument over the argument itself? Someone can appear from another room and settle the original point of dispute with a, “Hey guys, I googled it, and it turns out that what really happened was X,” but the argument keeps on going, the conflict generates new injuries, new injustices, new grudges. This can become a war of all against all, described in thousands of papers by anthropologists documenting thousands of ‘primal chaos’ rituals. The rituals re-enact the primal violence which preceded the establishment of our clan, village, city, empire – out of which order came. The rituals remind us how bad things can get.
So then why aren’t societies in a perpetual state of war? How did order come? How did mankind survive this long? This is where Girard gets really interesting. Order comes from a scapegoat, someone on whom the hatred and guilt of the community can be affixed, someone who can then be sacrificed to purge the hatreds of the community. The scapegoat is not truly guilty. He couldn’t possibly be. He probably wasn’t even there when the mimesis started, scapegoats are frequently foreign visitors. He doesn’t have the power to send a whole community into chaos. This blind man who wandered into the village couldn’t have stolen all those sacred artifacts. That strange babbling woman couldn’t have ruined the crop. Those Jews and/or Gypsies would have absolutely no reason to poison the village well. But the community needs them to be guilty, so it often invents supernatural powers (witchcraft) or supernaturally wicked motivations (devil worship), and the community has now found its point of unity – the strangers must be killed. Oedipus must have been a moral monster, a mother-raper and a patricide. He has brought the wrath of the gods down upon us and he must die, at his own hand or ours. Usually it’s the latter the hands of others, lots of hands, either casting stones or casting ballots.
The victim dies, and by dying, reunites the community. Now that they have died and are no longer a threat and have performed the sacred function of re-founding the city, they are to be honored. When a champion dies in the Hunger Games, the majestic music plays — they are now ‘the fallen’. They are heroes – the social order depends on them. They have restored order by their death. They save many lives by dying. Girard suggests that the rehabilitation of the victim is perhaps an unconscious admission that the victim was, in fact, innocent. The innocence of the victim is a useful lie which cannot be acknowledged; otherwise, it is no longer useful and the violence must begin again. Girard calls this final phase ‘the scapegoat mechanism’.
The discovery of this pattern is what Girard called his ‘first conversion’. This is the conversion away from the romantic illusion that autonomous authentic man was an achievable idea, from the modern idea that religion was optional for mankind and that violence was an interruption of, and imposition upon, the default equilibrium of peace. For Girard, violence is the origin of archaic religion and archaic religion is the foundation of human culture itself. These are the ‘things hidden from the foundation of the world’, mankind’s need to reenact the cycle of violence no matter what his intentions or aims. Modern man pretends that we’re past all that, but that is another useful life – another romantic illusion.
Read the whole thing here – there’s more, really, lots more – here.
Postscript: Can’t get enough of cool? Try reading Chris Fleming‘s essay on “Theoretical Cool” over at the Sydney Review of Books.
Tags: Jerry Bowyer, Neil Scott, René Girard