CONTORTED PASTA

Sorry the Girard posts dried up, there ... I've been scrambling to tidy away all that has to be done before I spend a week on a sailing ship, next week. Meanwhile the house has been thrown into upheaval with one housemate surprise-leaving, so despite the crunch I am very thankful to be running away to sea as there is nothing I can do about it.

Anyway, neither writing posts nor getting ahead a little in the radio series have been high priorities, so as you can see, things have slid. I will keep going until I reach the point I want to reach, though, Lent or no. This point is currently eighteen entries from now, but I tend to reorganise as I go along so it's impossible to say, really. If you want to 'read ahead' as it were, the radio series is here: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/the-scapegoat-the-ideas-of-rené-girard-part-1-1.3474195 (scroll down to find all 5 parts). We've got through episode 1, but I recommend listening to it anyway because David Cayley structures his explanation a bit differently; there may be things that I didn't cover, which he will refer to later.

My very favourite movie just so happens to have a perfect encapsulation of the single victim mechanism, so I shall walk you through it as an exemplum.

This is Mr Hollom. He is an anomaly in being a 29-year old midshipman. Midshipmen are sort of apprentice officers; as you can see, his peers are all basically children.



He breaks a taboo by fraternizing with the crew – or trying to – when officers and crew are supposed to be strictly divided. Here he is trying to join in their jolly shanty sing-along.




( Come One, Come All, To Girardian Screencap Theatre )

Chapter 21: The Founding Murder

So we've had our mimetic crisis, as the war of each-against-each hots up and violence rises. Our animosities have aligned and then, like a magnet to iron filings, the scapegoat attracts all the community's violence and unifies us in collective hatred of them. We rise up, unite our energies for the very necessary and urgent expulsion of this common enemy, and when at last the battle is won, peace reigns in the land.

As Girard puts it:

No one in the community has an enemy other than the victim, so once this person is hunted, expelled, and destroyed, the crowd finds itself emptied of hostility and without an enemy. Only one enemy was left, one who has been eliminated. Provisionally, at least, this community no longer experiences either hatred or resentment toward anyone or anything; it feels purified* of all its tensions, of all its divisions, of everything fragmenting it.
     The persecutors don't know that their sudden harmony, like their previous discord, is the work of contagious imitation. They believe they have on their hands a dangerous person, someone evil, of whom they must rid the community. What could be more sincere than their hatred? Thus the mimetic ganging up of all against one, or the single victim mechanism, has the amazing but logically explicable property of restoring calm to a community so disturbed an instant earlier that nothing appeared capable of calming it down. [I See Satan Fall Like Ligntning, Chapter 3]

If the scapegoat was responsible for all the bad feelings – as they most certainly were, or we would not have violently expelled them; we are reasonable creatures – then they must also be responsible for this sudden inexplicable peace which has come upon us, because it was their expulsion/death that it brought it about. They must be something other than human, to have this powerful effect on all of us. Perhaps they are something divine. Perhaps they didn't really die, or were transformed, or did die in some mortal sense but are granting us their blessings from beyond the veil.

This all sounds like I'm assuming people are credulous idiots, but remember that this is unconscious, and the effect can be subtle. There are enough historical examples to show how this seed could be planted, which grows as the collective violence recedes in the cultural memory. It doesn't have to be a literal divinization (though it sometimes is: think of Julius Caesar) – often the scapegoat is just put on a pedestal, or gilded in an attempt to make a collective apology for the collective violence. Over time, as history turns into legend, these can become divinizations, and even within living memory the effect can be almost the same.

My favourite example of this is the Romanov family. At the time of the Russian Revolution, Nicholas II was on the throne; as the top representative of the feudal system, the people's rage focused on him and his family. They were quickly apprehended and sent off into exile, where, eventually, they were executed. In 1981 they were canonised as saints by the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad, and adopted by the church at home after Communism fell. You don't get more divinized than that these days.

There are echoes, also, in how John F. Kennedy is remembered in the US. He was not a victim of collective violence, but was a victim whose death united a deeply divided country in mourning – a scapegoat after the fact, in a way. He is now held up as an ideal of an American president, his administration mythologised as 'Camelot,' his persona unimpeachable compared to his peers.

The tendency to divinize scapegoats may not be consciously known, but is unconsciously acknowledged by anyone who advises not to kill a prominent figure 'lest they become a martyr.' A martyr may not be a god, but they continue to have power over their followers after death – perhaps even more than in life – which is close enough for government work, as they say.

*This is the Greek notion of catharsis, which I will definitely be getting into later [points at icon], but there's a lot of dinner to get through before dessert.

Chapter 19: Which Goat to Scape?

This is another small semi-diversion from Girard's thinking, but one which I feel is important to explore a little, in light of mental health, especially trends in young people.

If we imitate each other's desires, and also imitate each other's animosities, then it stands to reason that if someone's animosity is directed at us, we might imitate their hatred and turn it into self-hatred.

Someone with a robust ego would see hatred directed at them and rebuff it with defiance, or perhaps mirror the animosity and enter a rivalry with the person victimizing them. But if you do not have such a firm belief in the rightness of your self, or if you've been conditioned not to project or transfer animosity onto another relationship, you will adopt the animosity of your accuser, their desire to see you brought low, and turn that against yourself. What is depression, self-harm, or suicide, but the imitation and enaction of others' violence towards you?

"" (Watch on YouTube)

I'd really like to know where Quasi got enough confidence to sing that whole optimistic song. Gosh.

Chapter 17: The Mimetic Crisis

Most everyone is familiar with the term 'scapegoat' to refer to an individual or group which is blamed for whatever needs blaming. They are usually just an easy target and not necessarily guilty as charged, or not as guilty as the mob says they are, but blaming them is a simple solution to a complicated situation, and people like those.

The origin of the term is in that (in)famous compilation of ancient Hebrew law, the book of Leviticus. There was a tradition, lo these many centuries ago, where on the Day of Atonement, the high priest would take a he-goat and ritually transfer all the sins of the community onto it. It would then be driven off into the wilderness, taking all those sins with it, giving the community a moral blank slate to start the new year, and maybe do better this time. It is an odd permutation of an animal sacrifice (which was also practised at this time) but an evocative one.

The unifying power of a common enemy – a collective act of violence against a target which is the receptacle of a society's bad feelings – is the core of Girard's thinking. The chaos of each-against-each mimetic rivalries turning into the unity of all-against-one in the expulsion of the scapegoat is, for him, a fundamental pattern in all human societies, and utilised through history to keep human violence under control. He calls this the single victim mechanism.



Chapter 15: The Single Victim Mechansim

As desires and violence are transmitted from person to person, they can gradually spread across an entire culture. The parallel to contagious disease is an apt one: some desires take a great deal of work and ideal conditions to pass on, others sweep through a population like wildfire. Twenty years ago hardly anyone outside of California had met a vegan, and it was a scandal when a celebrity was outed as gay. On the other hand, you would definitely have heard of the macarena and probably done it a few times. Twenty years on, the general public's attitudes towards sustainability and homosexuality have changed tremendously ... and we're doing the macarena again, apparently.

There are plenty of examples of social contagion through history, from the adoption of Roman culture by the colonised Brits, to the dancing plagues of the Middle Ages, to the California Gold Rush. The invention of mass media, broadcast media, and especially the Internet, have sped up the rate at which imitation can spread, to the point where something can 'go viral' far faster and more effectively than any actual virus can. But they are not responsible for the phenomenon in itself; rather, they take advantage of, and amplify, an existing tendency in human nature.

As imitations get passed around, some are more powerful than others, and, being more attractive, eliminate the competition. This sees a gradual re-alignment of desires and rivalries until all of society organises its antipathy in one direction, which is what we will talk about next.

Girard Digest 13: Alignment

He’d never, ever, laid a finger on anyone. He’d always run rather than fight. And murder, now, surely murder was an absolute? You couldn’t commit 0.021 of a murder, could you?

It's time once again to redefine a word you thought you knew, for the purposes of understanding mimetic theory.

Most of us think of 'violence' as some variation on hitting someone with a baseball bat. This is, of course, violence. But sociologically, violence is a spectrum that includes blunt instrument trauma along with any sort of behaviour that robs from another human being the quality of life they might otherwise have achieved. So, breaking someone's legs with a baseball bat: definitely violence, as they now have to cope with a disability. It is also violence to deny someone access to basic needs, or to work upon someone's mind until they believe themselves unworthy of fulfilling those needs.

I can try to explain this all I like, but a far better writer than me embedded a decent exploration of the broader meaning of violence within one of my very favourite stories:

     'You can’t just go around killing people!'
     'Why Not? You Do.' The golem lowered his arm.
     'What?' said Moist. 'I do not! Who told you that?'
     'I Worked It Out. You Have Killed Two Point Three Three Eight People,' said the golem calmly.
     'I have never laid a finger on anyone in my life, Mr. Pump. I may be—all the things you know I am, but I am not a killer! I have never so much as drawn a sword!'
     'No, You Have Not. But You Have Stolen, Embezzled, Defrauded, And Swindled Without Discrimination, Mr. Lipvig. You Have Ruined Businesses And Destroyed Jobs. When Banks Fail, It Is Seldom Bankers Who Starve. Your Actions Have Taken Money From Those Who Had Little Enough To Begin With. In A Myriad Small Ways You Have Hastened The Deaths Of Many. You Did Not Know Them. You Did Not See Them Bleed. But You Snatched Bread From Their Mouths And Tore Clothes From Their Backs. For Sport, Mr. Lipvig. For Sport. For The Joy Of The Game.'

Terry Pratchett, Going Postal

Moist von Lipwig was fairly indiscriminate with his acts of violence, but when this violence is organised systematically – racism, sexism, ageism, etc – then it is called structural violence. Structural violence has been much in the discourse lately, highlighted by the Black Lives Matter and Me Too movements, among others. It is important to remember, though, that structural violence starts at home. It didn't spring up when a committee got together to decide, for example, that African Americans were disposable; it merely enshrines a pattern of individual acts of violence, and being thus enshrined gives them broader societal permission. And those acts of violence need not be shootings on the street or lynchings in backwoods Alabama: violence includes quiet everyday actions like denying someone clean drinking water, banning them from your swimming pool, or telling your children not to sit near them on the bus. I deny you a job with health benefits, and I 0.73 kill you.

Sociology uses this very broad definition of violence because it encompasses both the violent acts we commonly consider to be ‘violence’ and the hostile thoughts and feelings from which the violent acts progress. Understanding them as one phenomenon with varying degrees of expression gives a fuller picture of what’s going on. When a woman stabs her husband, we call her the ‘violent’ one, but when you understand that he has been emotionally abusing her for decades, the violence has been there all along, and the assault is only the latest evolution of it. Similarly, a man who has been propagating hatred of Muslims online does not only become ‘violent’ when he opens fire on a Christchurch mosque: he has been violent the whole time. If violent behaviours can be recognised for what they are and corrected before they turn into what we commonly think of as ‘violence,’ then loss of life and livelihood can be prevented. If violence is off our radar until it turns into physical violence, then it's too late.

Girard uses the term ‘violence’ for the animosity that arises from mimetic rivalry, which is either directed at one’s rival or transferred to some other opponent because violence within the rivalry is impermissible. It is important to remember that this means hatred, suspicion, undermining, ostracisation, and scorn as much as it does actual acts of physical violence. In many cases the physical violence only occurs long after the social violence has a secure foundation. An apple can only exist if there is an apple tree for it to grow from; just so, the acts we consider ‘violent’ grow from a structure of violence that does not necessarily resemble the fruit.

Girard Digest 11: Mimetic Violence

I'm going to go a bit off-piste with this entry, and indulge some of my own thoughts before I continue on the main thread of this series and what I know of Réné Girard's thinking. I take complete responsibility for what's in this entry, so if it's complete bollocks, don't blame Girard!

Competition is, by its nature, in search of a resolution. It must either be won or abandoned. If the point of a competition is to win it, then how do you win so definitively that you nullify any opportunity for rivalry to return? If you achieve your desire, even if this desire has no further desire on the other side of it (uncommon) you continually compete to retain it; to prove, eternally, that you are the most deserving. Using the example from yesterday of a romantic relationship, marriage is only the end of the story in Disney movies. The same goes for other thresholds of achievement.

There are two ways to put a complete stop to mimetic rivalry: first, relinquish your desire. The cuckolded husband in 'El curioso impertanente' commits suicide, the ultimate concession of defeat. The other is to prove your absolute dominance of the desire by destroying the object of that desire.

This last is a common feature in Romantic literature, especially tragedies. The mimetic rivalry becomes so consuming that in order to best all one's rivals, one destroys the very thing that you were rivals for. My sterling example of this is Rogozhin in Dostoevsky's The Idiot: his desire for Nastasya, who has drawn most of the men in the book into a mimetic rivalry for her, is so completely overpowering that (spoiler) he ends up murdering her. Othello's murder of Desdemona is much the same: it doesn't matter that the rivalry which obsessed him was fabricated by Iago, once that seed was planted, they were on their way to tragedy. Many such 'crimes of passion' arise from this compulsion to assert one's dominion over the object of desire, from sudden slaying to the slow death of emotional abuse.

The destructive resolution of mimetic rivalry explains a phenomenon in fan culture, too, I think, which has been called 'breaking all the toys.' Russell T. Davies was often criticised for this when he was showrunning Doctor Who and then Torchwood, when he would write the canon into a closed box by killing off the cast or some other such finality. In some fandoms the competition between fans gets so intense that the fans become rivals of the creators, trying to prove that theirs is the greater love, greater even than the love that brought the thing into being. This seems especially common in pre-existing properties where the current creators are continuing a franchise started by someone else, and are therefore merely a sort of elevated fan. If these creators are not careful, they can get sucked into the fan rivalry. I think Davies' moves were his power play in that game: he asserted his dominance over those who desired a show by writing it into a position where no one else could get their grubby hands on it, even if it meant destroying it. The image of a toddler breaking the toys he doesn't want to share strips bare the role of mimetic rivalry in this behaviour.


On a global level, the United States and Soviet Union were so entrenched in their mimetic rivalry that they amassed enough firepower to annihilate the world they wanted to possess. Luckily for all of us it never came to that (or, at least, we have backed away from that precipice), but for a while we were well on our way to the ultimate breaking of the toys.

Admitting defeat or destroying the object of desire are internal resolutions for the mimetic rivalry – the dynamic is entirely contained amongst the players, including its ending. This makes sense in a narrative, where you need to wrap things up within the characters and timeline you've established. In reality, internal resolutions are generally best avoided: most of us would rather not commit murder, or admit defeat. Therefore the anxieties stirred up by mimetic rivalry are transferred externally, and that will get us back on the Yellow Brick Road tomorrow.

Chapter 9: Transference

Individuals who share a desire are united by something so powerful that, as long as they can share their desire, they remain the best of friends. As soon as they cannot, they become the worst of enemies. ... We want others to love what we love, admire what we admire, but as soon as they do, they're our competitors.

– David Cayley, Ideas: The Scapegoat, Ep. 1

The sharing of desires/values is a powerful social bond, which brings people together and gives them a common purpose. But when two people desire the same thing, they run the risk of becoming rivals. As long as their attention is on the object of desire, and that thing is sufficiently far off, or plentiful, or abstract, that they can both desire it without getting in one another's way, their rivalry can be forestalled. It is difficult to continue in this stasis indefinitely, though: either one will lose interest and fall away, or they will begin to compete with each other, if not for the object itself, then to prove that their own desire is the strongest.

Common wisdom has it that a little competition is a good thing: it spurs people to do better, to make more, to put in that little extra effort and achieve what they thought they couldn't. To some extent this is true, but competition is a powerful tonic – a little may be beneficial, but more than that is toxic, and it's easy to get the dose wrong or lose control.

As imitative creatures, we want others to imitate our desires, so we model a desire and say, 'imitate me.' Once someone takes up your call, you become what Girard calls mimetic doubles – they imitate you, you imitate them, and gradually you become more and more alike as you both strive towards the object of your desire. The more your goals align, the closer you become – either more identical, or more precise mirror images, as discussed in chapter 3.

As our desires define our identity, another person moving into the same psychological space feels threatening, and we move to defend our territory. We want them to imitate us, but we want them to stay safely on that side of the imaginary line, and for their desire not to challenge ours. People generally tend to feel that their mimetic rival is more successful at modeling the desire than they are, which prompts a psychological (and indeed sometimes literal) arms race as they one-up the other's intensity of desire. Your mimetic rival is simultaneously your model and the obstacle between you and your desire, who must be overcome.

Eventually the intensity of the rivalry eclipses the desire which brought you together in the first place: your focus is primarily on outdoing the competition, rather than the object of desire in itself.

"" (Watch on YouTube)

This pattern is abundantly clear in fandom. Fandoms coalesce around a shared interest, which is a type of desire, and for a while, a productive and supportive community is formed. But then people start getting competitive about who is the biggest/best fan, and that's when the purity tests and shipping wars start, as fans, or groups of fans (which inevitably splinter into individuals as the rivalry turns inwards), jockey for position as No. 1 and set bars for others, to narrow the competition. 'Imitate me in the love of this thing,' they say, 'but don't get closer to it than me.'

Chapter 7: Deceit, Desire, and the Novel

As human beings and creatures of the world, we want things. This is obvious. Some of the things we want are what any animal would want, what they need to survive: food, water, shelter; love, sex, children. These desires are driven by instinct, and satisfy biological needs. If we weren't compelled to strive for them, we (or, eventually, the species) would perish.

But there is a whole world of other desires on top of these. The sneakers with sparkles on, the tickets to Hamilton, the solar panels, the iPhone – they don't satisfy your biological needs any better than their alternatives, but they tell you something about who you are, and your place in society. We want solar panels because we want to be The Person Who Helps The Environment, or The Person Who Is Independent Of The Grid, or The Person Who Nabbed That Sweet Tax Rebate (or some combination of the three) – or perhaps we want not to have solar panels, because we want to be The Person With Superior Knowledge Of The Solar Industry.

Each model carries its own cultural cachet, and each model has an appeal. They are culturally driven desires, which are determined by the desires of those around us, by what is valued in our culture. Because culture runs on that subconscious imitation called mimesis, they are, therefore, mimetic desires.

Chapter 5: Mimetic Desires