Classes and Lectures on the Mimetic Theory of Rene Girard

Classes and Talks on Mimetic Theory

Since 1945, our species has been faced with the prospect of total annihilation if we fail to understand and control our violence. Mimetic Theory, the brainchild of French-American scholar René Girard of Stanford University, draws on insights from the great literature of the Western world to propose a new model for both understanding and mitigating the violence that plagues us.

Doughlas Remy was first introduced to Mimetic Theory while doing graduate studies in French and Italian at the University of Texas. His interest in this theory has turned into a life-long passion. Since the mid-nineties, Remy has offered lectures and workshops on Girard's writings. He has spoken in Puget Sound churches and taught a short course in Mimetic Theory at Edmonds Community College. He is a member of the Colloquium on Violence and Religion, which was founded to develop Girard's theories, and he has participated since 2004 in a Seattle-based discussion group about Mimetic Theory.

Classes:

Currently, Mr. Remy is offering a short course that he first developed for the Maplewood Presbyterian Church adult education program in 2006. This series consists of three to six hours of lectures and discussions, accompanied by Powerpoint slides. Sessions are from one to two hours, and approximately one-quarter of each hour is set aside for discussion.

Fees:

Mr. Remy's fee for these lectures is $100 per session. The "short" version of this lecture series lasts three hours, which may be divided into either two or three sessions. The "full" versions lasts six hours, which may be divided into either three or six sessions.

Recommended reading/viewing for the series:

Mr. Remy will supply an extended bibliography and a filmography during the course and will recommend titles to get students started in a study of Mimetic Theory. However, no reading is required of course participants, and there are no materials to purchase. However, all participants are asked to view the following three films before beginning the lecture series:

"All About Eve" (1950), directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, starring Bette Davis and Anne Baxter.
"Fury" (1936), directed by Fritz Lang and starring Spencer Tracy.
"I Shot Andy Warhol" (1996), directed by Mary Harron, starring Lili Taylor as Valerie Solanas.

Understanding Our Violence (Excerpt)

by Doughlas Remy, Member, Colloquium on Violence and Religion

“The 10,000-year experiment of the settled life will stand or fall by what we do, and don’t do, now.”

--Ronald Wright
A Short History of Progress

We are only a few years this side of what may have been the most horrendously violent century in the history of humankind. Casualties in World War I numbered around 37 million, of which 15 million were civilian or military deaths. In World War II, 62 million people died, including the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis. More tens of millions of people were murdered in the purges and genocides of Stalin, Mao Tse-Tung and Pol Pot. In his book God and Empire (Harper, 2007), John Dominic Crossan observes that humans in the last century “have done far worse things to one another on this earth and to the earth itself than anything imagined even in that terrible vision of the Warrior Christ or in any of the other visions of the Great Apocalypse.” Since 1945, we are faced with the possibility of total annihilation and extinction of our species in a nuclear war, and we seem to be no closer to understanding our violence than we were at the beginning of the last century.

There is nothing new about the violence of the last century except its scale and the technical sophistication of the instruments used to carry it out. Our species has always had extraordinary difficulty in managing and channeling its violence, especially since the Bronze Age, when horses were domesticated and war chariots were first built. Other primate species, especially certain baboons, have been observed engaging in something very much like war, where an entire troop may be killed off by a rival troop. But intra-species violence has reached unprecedented levels in humans, and we urgently need to understand why.

One of the reasons why we are more violent is that we can be. After all, we are the species that makes tools—and thus weapons. The baboons to which I just referred could wield a stick or throw a stone, but our species was able to forge metal into more deadly forms of the stick and to hurl explosive charges through the air from guns and cannons. We have become so sophisticated in our ability to inflict death and destruction through the use of weapons that we’ve had to invent new words to describe the scale of the destruction we cause. “Genocide” has now been surpassed by the prospect of “cosmicide”—the annihilation of our world through use of nuclear or biological weapons.

The production and use of tools—and thus weapons—could not have occurred without certain physiological developments in our species, especially the opposable thumb. But destruction on the scale of modern warfare requires vastly more than an opposable thumb. Humans could never have become so destructive if their powers of symbolization had not developed so far beyond those of other species. Wars cannot be fought without organization, training, and communication, all of which have depended on our very sophisticated use of symbols.

Physiology and symbolization may only account for the “how” of mass violence, and in any case, there is no turning back the clock on human evolution, even if we were to decide that doing so would be in our interest. So a more important question for us—and one that may offer us more hope for the future than discussions of the role of evolution is a “Why” question. Why do humans slaughter each other, and what purpose is served by the carnage? We are in no way destined or bound to annihilate each other or ourselves simply because we have the power to do so. People who are caught up in the frenzy of war may believe they are acting rationally, but a sober historical assessment nearly always reveals that they have lost control and that they are in the grips of forces that they do not understand. These forces serve primitive instinctual drives that are rationally incompatible with our vastly increased capacity for violence. In other words, the need for individual or group survival may not be best served by killing any and all outsiders simply because we can. So we urgently need answers to questions about why humans actually deploy the awesome powers of destruction that our evolutionary development has made possible.

To understand these destructive forces that appear to control us so much more than we control them, we will examine a function of symbolization that is not commonly recognized—namely, mimesis, or mimetic behavior. Briefly, mimesis is unconscious imitative behavior of the kind that accounts for a host of bizarre social phenomena such as stock market bubbles or witch hunts. However, the bizarre nature of these examples mustn’t cause us to think of mimesis as somehow “other.” Stock market bubbles and witch hunts are only two of its more visible manifestations—ones in which its contagious aspects cannot be ignored. What we must recognize is that mimesis is absolutely pervasive in all aspects of human culture from the macro level of civilizations themselves down to the micro level of virtually all interdividual psychology. For our study of mimesis, we will turn to Mimetic Theory as originally developed through the writings of French scholar Rene Girard.

I characterized mimesis as “unconscious” imitative behavior, and it largely is. Becoming conscious of our mimesis is extremely difficult, but it can and must be done. Awareness can have positive mitigating effects on both the level and extent of violent behavior. This is why there is hope. We are not doomed to endless re-enactments of the Holocaust or of the Iraq war. Such cycles of brutality and destruction can be ended, but not without first understanding why they occur and then building that understanding into an ongoing cultural discipline.

If our powers of symbolization can be pressed into the service of primitive instincts of survival, they also offer us our only hope of overriding instinctual drives and achieving more affiliative and constructive behavior.

Besides offering a systemic approach to understanding the “Why?” of violence, Mimetic Theory also proposes a framework for understanding its workings, or what Girard calls its “mécanisme.” This is another “How,” but the “How” question that Mimetic Theory proposes to answer is now “How do mimetic forces sometimes lead to violence?”

We must also visit the writings of Ernest Becker in our explorations of the “Whys” and “Hows” of violence. I have often thought while reading Girard that an insertion point could be made wherever Girard talks about “being” or “ontology,” and that we would then put aside Girard until we have read Ernest Becker’s works. (This could work the other way round were it not that Girard’s writings are so much more numerous than Becker’s.)

No Easy Answers: Conflict Avoidance and Pacifism

Communities

We cannot hope to completely banish conflict and violence from our world. Conflict will occur as long as there are humans, and much of it will be healthy and productive. People who are able to respectfully disagree may yet have a basis for mutual understanding and positive action.

In any case, conflict avoidance is not always an ethical stance. The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. understood perfectly that to wash one’s hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means in effect to side with the powerful. King and other spiritual leaders such as Nelson Mandela and Mel White have been as radically subversive of the established order as Jesus and Mohandas Gandhi were—and, like Jesus and Gandhi, they were able to embrace conflict without recourse to violence.

But a rigorously non-violent stance may be no more possible—or even desirable—than conflict avoidance. Most of us can easily imagine ourselves reacting violently if our homes or families were threatened, and when hostages are taken in a bank heist or an airplane hijacking, our sympathies are nearly always with the police, provided they use violence surgically and only as a last resort. The state power that they represent is a two-edged sword that requires continuous monitoring, but we are clearly its beneficiaries when violence erupts in our communities.

Another kind of monitoring is also called for in these scenarios, and it must happen at the level of individuals searching their own hearts and minds in the aftermath of a police intervention. Episodes of criminal violence reveal the failure of societal institutions at every level, from the family to schools, churches, hospitals, and state corrections systems, and so we cannot allow ourselves for one moment to feel triumphant or even necessarily safer when we witness a successful but violent intervention. Triumphalism and a spirit of vengeance only create the conditions for further dysfunctions and resentments; they signal to a society’s oppressed members that the state is more concerned with retribution—the “tit for tat” of violence—than with justice, mercy, and compassion.

When citizens support police interventions, we can and must work to ensure that the police and the state they represent will be effective not only in the immediate scenario but in the larger and longer-term ones of courts, hospitals, and prisons. When we begin to perceive the police as just another gang, the justice system as systemically unjust, and state prisons as breeding grounds for further violence, then we begin to despair of any remedy for violence through further “controlled” and state-sanctioned violence, which claims for itself the distinction of being the violence that “ends violence.” Under ideal circumstances, however, we expect our governments to provide civil security even if they must sometimes resort to violent means.

Nations

I was living in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia in 1990 when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, just a few miles up the road from us. We immediately sensed that our lives were in danger because we knew that Saddam might be planning to seize the Saudi oil fields. I was relieved and grateful when I saw the U.S. 82nd Airborne Division landing at the airbase nearby. And when the war began several months later, I was happy to see Kuwait liberated. As I realized later, however, this scenario of humanitarian rescue was already compromised even before our troops landed on Saudi soil. The most decisive motivation behind our intervention turned out to have been our long-range imperial aspirations and our insatiable greed for oil. Whatever decent impulses we may have felt at the outset quickly became contaminated by jingoism, triumphalism, and a spirit of vengeance. Many Americans cheered in response to the televised spectacle of American jets bombarding fleeing Iraqi forces on the highway out of Kuwait City. Others recognized that this was our moral low point in that war, just one more sickening descent into the spectator vio-porn of shock and awe.

What happened in that short period of time between the invasion of Kuwait and its liberation? How did we go so quickly from the “necessary violence” of rescuing victims to the “gratuitous violence” of creating victims? The answer to that question is not simple, but we must work diligently to find it. There is hardly any question of greater importance for our world.

In “The End of Faith” (page 199), Sam Harris writes, “…pacifism is ultimately nothing more than a willingness to die, and to let others die, at the pleasure of the world’s thugs.” Though Gandhi’s principles of non-violence can be effectively applied in many circumstances, he himself appeared to have realized that non-violence was not an ethical response to the Holocaust. The only remedy he proposed was that the Jews should have committed mass suicide in order to awaken the world to the horrors of Hitler’s persecution of them. But this was only substitution of violence against others by violence against oneself.

Having (regretfully) disparaged the pacifist impulse, I would now like to praise it. Rigorous pacifism may not be possible in all scenarios, but neither are many other ethical principles to which we subscribe. We may believe fervently in Jesus’ commandment to love our neighbor as ourselves or to refrain from judging others, but we also know that we constantly fall short. Constant failure doesn’t invalidate the principle, however. It only proves that we are weak or that we haven’t yet figured out how to be faithful to the principle. In any event, those who genuinely work for peace but fail are much less to be feared than those who resort to violence without misgivings and without making serious efforts to avoid it.

Pacifism may not be a very pragmatic response to an event like the Holocaust, but a valid intuition lies at its core. Most of us who have experienced or witnessed violence know that it is very hard to control and that it can spread like a contagion. This is its nature. The Greeks understood this 3000 years ago and had a term—miasma—to describe the contagious spread of violence. When we are caught up in it, our thinking can very quickly become irrational, as it did in the first Gulf War. What begins as a “surgical” strike may quickly escalate into an unstoppable bloodbath, fueled by reprisals and counter-reprisals. In this apocalyptic age, we can no longer allow our political leaders to ignore this fact.

These are complex and seemingly intractable issues, and they are among the great dilemmas of being human. I would not like to suggest for even a moment that I or anyone else has found definitive answers. Instead, I would like to focus on a limited set of questions about violence with the hope that we can learn to recognize its patterns and its workings. Understanding can, after all, change behavior.