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Girard Digest 9: Transference
Mar. 15th, 2019 07:46 amConflict, generally, is not OK. When you are caught up in the strains of a mimetic rivalry, there's a lot of animosity that can't be expressed or resolved in an acceptable way – murder generally being frowned upon, and defeat unconscionable, or maybe just, you know, keeping the friendship is more important. So it's floating around like static electricity in a thunderhead, looking for somewhere to ground. At some point you are introduced to someone else's opponent, which feels much safer than yours – they're further removed, or the rivalry more diluted amongst a large crowd – and bam! Like a lightning bolt, the animosity of the first rivalry is channelled into the second.
You probably don't even realise this is what you are doing. The bad feelings from the original relationship are uncomfortable, so as soon as you find somewhere to put them that decreases the load on your mental servers, and has fewer consequences than the original rivalry, you do so. This is the grease that keeps society running smoothly and its individuals moderately sane. If we were all trapped in conflict with those nearest to us there would be individual crimes of passion all over the place.
In the radio documentary, Girard gives an example that we can probably all identify with: You have a colleague who comes in to work even more fired up than usual about politics, for no discernible reason. There may be no actual political reason why he's so passionate about it today. But last night he had a fight with his wife; he can't express his anger with her without making the situation worse, and he can't defuse the situation constructively, so he turns that animosity against his political opponents. This is not a conscious decision – he did not wake up that morning and decide to be angry at Congress instead of his wife, and goodness knows there's always some justification for political anger – but the ferocity of this fury has been fed by that deflected stream.
There was a theory around the end of the 19th century that organised sports was a way to deflect the sort of energies that would otherwise lead to war, and that the conflicts of the future might be played out on the football pitch rather than the battlefield. This theory doesn't come up much after the First World War, and the Second probably killed it, but from a Girardian perspective it's not all wrong – being able to transfer your animosity onto an athletic rivalry which is, in the end, inconsequential, could be a helpful release valve. In my opinion, the trouble with it is that they weren't anticipating the 20th century's consumer culture would pump so much mimetic desire into the population that nothing could satisfy it.
Chapter 10: Violence
You probably don't even realise this is what you are doing. The bad feelings from the original relationship are uncomfortable, so as soon as you find somewhere to put them that decreases the load on your mental servers, and has fewer consequences than the original rivalry, you do so. This is the grease that keeps society running smoothly and its individuals moderately sane. If we were all trapped in conflict with those nearest to us there would be individual crimes of passion all over the place.
In the radio documentary, Girard gives an example that we can probably all identify with: You have a colleague who comes in to work even more fired up than usual about politics, for no discernible reason. There may be no actual political reason why he's so passionate about it today. But last night he had a fight with his wife; he can't express his anger with her without making the situation worse, and he can't defuse the situation constructively, so he turns that animosity against his political opponents. This is not a conscious decision – he did not wake up that morning and decide to be angry at Congress instead of his wife, and goodness knows there's always some justification for political anger – but the ferocity of this fury has been fed by that deflected stream.
There was a theory around the end of the 19th century that organised sports was a way to deflect the sort of energies that would otherwise lead to war, and that the conflicts of the future might be played out on the football pitch rather than the battlefield. This theory doesn't come up much after the First World War, and the Second probably killed it, but from a Girardian perspective it's not all wrong – being able to transfer your animosity onto an athletic rivalry which is, in the end, inconsequential, could be a helpful release valve. In my opinion, the trouble with it is that they weren't anticipating the 20th century's consumer culture would pump so much mimetic desire into the population that nothing could satisfy it.
Chapter 10: Violence
