René Girard VII: Mimesis and Consumerism

The text below is an old draft of an excerpt from the book Catharses.

Economics tells us that a strong middle class is necessary for economic prosperity. Of course it is. The statement is a tautology. A majority of citizens need to be well-off for the majority of citizens to be well off. The strong middle-class drives consumption, which creates jobs, which enable consumption. We end up in a developed society, which is a society that creates high levels of consumption. 

That is overall a good thing. Laptops and lattes are nice. Consumption of knowledge is nice. Getting machines to do my work while I engage in spiritually elevating labour is nice. But some things about high levels of consumption are not so nice. There’s the exploitation of the environment. Every bourgeois hysteric will tell you all about it, so I will not. I want to talk about the role of mimesis in consumption.

But first, let’s get the definition of bourgeois clear. This beautiful term has been neutered in the US. Was there some intention behind it? I don’t know. What I know is that in the US today bourgeois simply means rich. Some say “bougie”. Yet the original meaning of the word did not quite mean “rich”. It did not mean poor either. The closest English-language term to the original and proper meaning of the adjective bourgeois would probably be middle class (at least before this class went down the gutter at the turn of the 21st century).

Intellectuals developed the concept of the bourgeoisie during the period when the bourgeois or middle class came to political power in Europe. After the French Revolution, a literary stereotype of the bourgeois developed, and it was not a positive one. The novelists and sociologists of the nineteenth century often talked about the petite bourgeoisie, which translates directly to little bourgeoise, but which was translated into English as petty bourgeoisie. Their chief trait was a sort of superficiality. They did not live the real struggles of the working class, and for that reason the socialists resented them. They were fundamentally spoiled by comfort. At the same time, in the eyes of the rich they were essentially snobs. They are not rich but want to be rich, and often pretend to be rich. The bourgeois were ridden with counterfeit passion whose true purpose was always social climbing. The rich resent bourgeois as usurpers. However, the desire of the bourgeois to become rich lends purpose to the lives of the rich themselves, as it confirms in their minds the value and indeed the transcendence of their social position. The bourgeois cause the rich to protect their status jealously, causing the rich to act bourgeois themselves.

René Girard develops a thesis on the bourgeois in his first book, Deceit Desire and the Novel. He covers the works of the great French novelist Stendhal, who focused his creative powers on interpreting the consequences of the disruptive rise of the bourgeois class at the beginning of the nineteenth century, in the wake of the French Revolution. Girard also analyses the work of the literary great Marcel Proust, who wrote novels at the turn of the twentieth century. Similar to Stendhal, Proust writes about class collision. He writes about bourgeois social climbers trying to enter the saloons of the dying aristocracy. Girard creates a brilliant unifying thread between these two writers and some others, especially Dostoevsky. He shows through his literary analysis that the bourgeois man is the modern man, and he shows that the modern man’s life is marked by an unprecedented amount of resentment, generated by an unprecedented amount of internal mediation of desire.

Mediation of desire means that our desires are at their root not caused by some object of desire, but are created by another person, called a model or mediator. We desire things because our model either possesses them or seems to desire them himself. We look up to our model because we believe that he possesses a higher state of being than us. There are two types of models. External models are those whom we admire but never hope to reach. Often when a bourgeois man talks about a man of genius, they admire them and even model their behaviour after them, yet never expect to become geniuses themselves. This is an external model. Deity is another example of an external model.

An internal model on the other hand is someone who is close enough to the subject that in time the subject may get so close to the model that the two become rivals. The subject and the model become stumbling blocks to each other. Resentment builds up between them. Because desire is imitative, it is contagious and spreads throughout society. Thus, resentment also builds up through society.

Prior to the emergence of the bourgeois, European and other societies were marked by many powerful boundaries between numerous social classes and social roles. Most people lived in small towns or villages. There was much less opportunity for internal mediation of desire because there was a high level of differentiation. There was much less resentment in society. That is not to say that there was no struggle and violence. There were plenty, but they took more open and decisive forms of violent insurrection, armed conflict or summary execution, rather than simmering in the form of suppressed, sublimated, and drawn-out rivalries that we call resentment.

With the emergence of large modern cities, many of the social boundaries broke down. The levees segregating the picturesque streams and ponds of human communities were breached, and masses of people poured down into congested cities to form large, putrid lakes of sameness and resentment.

What broke down the levees of differentiation and flooded the human condition with unbearable sameness can be analyzed in volumes. On the surface, there are many obvious reasons why the life of a city dweller, who lends the literal meaning to the term bourgeois, would attract peasants. The concentration and specialization of labour in cities boosted labour productivity and created opportunities for leisure, a hallmark of masters. Relatively liberal competition in the cities created a lottery of success that attracted those miserly outsiders who had nothing to lose. If a person suffers a scandal in a small community, often he will flee into the multitudes of the city and begin rebuilding his reputation there.

Once stuck in multitudes in monotonous slums, the aspiring bourgeois lose their unique identity. In the first and second generation they may identify with their place of origin, for example, but once the living memory of that is gone it loses its value in the differentiation market. And indeed, the consumer market is much more accurately described as a differentiation market, for this is what the consumer is striving to achieve, no matter how hopelessly. The rationalistic and currently dominant model of the consumer market as a market for maximizing utility, which is generally assumed to be an amount of materialistic pleasure, is founded on the modern delusion brilliantly discredited by Girard, to wit, the delusion that people possess authentic desires for objects, rather than desiring being or status of others whom they perceive to be above the mediocrity of the masses.

The monotonous masses of the cities grasp desperately at any opportunity for differentiation. They fight for their right to equal opportunity to become unequal. Religious or ideological convictions have historically been a popular differentiation mechanism. Before the advent of modernity in the West, and also today in regions of the world that are not entirely modernized, religion is a fixed constant that unites and appeases a community. Its rituals mark special occasions in the life of the individual and the nation. It is not possible for religious choices to play a differentiating role here because such societies invariably have only one religion. They haven’t lost the thread on the social role of religion and still remember that religion is what defines and unites a society.

On the other hand, in modern society religious conviction, whatever other role it may play, has become a differentiating factor within a multicultural surrounding. The same goes for its modern derivatives such as philosophical or political convictions. As much as we need to believe in the sovereignty of our beliefs, as Girard put it, “party platforms do not bring about political opposition - opposition brings about party platforms.” (Deceit, Desire and the Novel, Ch 5)

Religious and political belongings carve a niche for various in-groups, who, to have peace among themselves, must nevertheless form another “supra-religion”, or a “secular religion” whose sacrificial rituals will serve to unite the whole multicultural community, and thus serve the same purpose as those of archaic religions. The modern rituals we are talking about here are things like sports, entertainment, and possibly some recent wars that all or most of the groups participated in. Such religion should be superficial enough not to destroy traditional convictions because if that were to happen the entire differentiating mechanism based on them would fall apart. The delicate balance between traditional and secular religion today is called tolerance.

Perhaps the birth of Protestantism and endless multiplication of protestant sects was helped by the bourgeois need for differentiation. Protestantism was born and thrived in countries of early modern Europe that had developed a distinct and powerful bourgeois class. The related phenomenon of Freemasonry seems to have stemmed from a similar urge. In its early days Freemasonry seems to have enjoyed a certain elite and rebellious aura, but looking at it today, it tends to be an aspiration of the more abjectly stiffened bourgeois snobs. One is much more likely to see a Freemasonry bumper sticker on a Subaru than on a Lamborghini.

The problem with sectarian differentiation is that it causes violence. Traditional religion originates from times when there was no multiculturalism, so it was not designed to be tolerant. It was designed, among other things, to protect the community from violent enemies. Religion and its derivative of modern nationalism needed to be diluted with a less violent differentiation mechanism.

This is where consumerism comes in. Consumerism marries productivity, which perpetuates a level of bourgeois comfort, with the promise of differentiation. Through being a productive citizen, one earns the income to purchase objects that will signal to the community a differentiated state of the owner. They can be physical objects such as cars and houses, or they can be things like education and hobbies. Of course, as time passes in the meritocratic capitalist competition, your neighbours will acquire the same objects as you, annulling differentiation. There is a work-around for that: fashion. It will continually bring forth new objects for differentiation and forever recycle the race for differentiation. In each new race, one is invited anew to be the first to win the object and stand out among one’s peers at least temporarily. If one can win all the time, one can forever be fresh, as they now say.

There are still the wealthy classes in the cities whose extraordinary accumulated capital places them above the consumerist struggle of the bourgeois. Yet, the wealthy are humans too (not reptiles), and as such are subject to the same forces of mimetic desire as anyone else. Though they certainly don’t compete with the middle class for differentiation, they do compete with each other, and the battle is at least as bitter. The pitch of the mimetic strife of the wealthy is amplified by the bourgeois pressure to break into their ranks from below. The wealthy feed on the bourgeois desire to be wealthy just like them. As Girard explains so beautifully, when our models become aware of our desire for the objects that they possess, that very awareness generates value in the object in their eyes, and they begin to guard their status of possessors jealously. The vast middle-class strife for status is a powerful validation for the wealthy; it fills their lives with meaning. As Girard has found reading Stendhal, the bourgeois have bourgeois-fied the aristocracy, drawing them into the common mimetic struggle.

Yet, another great twist occurred in the second half of the twentieth century and is still unfolding now. It is the emergence of popular culture and mass entertainment, and today the vertiginous growth of social networks on the internet. Popular entertainment has become the most powerful focal point of desire perhaps ever. Desire is contagious, which means that any given group within a society can resist general fashions only with the reactionary building of boundaries. The criticisms that some outlying religious sects or socio-economic communities lay against popular entertainment always invoke moral arguments, but at a deeper level, they strive to maintain the differentiated status of the group. However, given the ubiquity and power of media, such groups are losing the battle. The connectedness of individuals has reached such high levels that everyone is getting drawn into the same mimetic vortex. It is ushering a whole new era of unrest marked by erasure of boundaries. Rich and the bourgeois alike are getting sucked into one vast slum of sameness.

The old-money rich fight against the popular culture, dismissing it as stupid. But their position must always contain some dishonesty, because whenever the wealthy denounce popular culture, they are inviting the popular assembly to take them, and not entertainment icons, as role models. Yet the wealthy would always want to remain the external models to the masses, and remain towards them paternalistic at best, and exploitative at worst. Alas, in the age of streaming entertainment and social networks, aristocratic past-times like horses or debutante balls have lost much of their romantic appeal. Ask Prince Harry.

There is a point when, perhaps after a long period of stagnation within the same socio-economic layer, differentiation through consumption of the most obvious signalling goods gets old. At this point, a person begins to develop unique tastes. For an average young man, there are always niche alternatives for consumption that cater to the pursuit of unique taste. A great recent example recently has been the craft beer trend.

With the wealthy, pursuit of unique taste can manifest itself in the form of consumption of exclusive art. The despair for differentiation may be a neglected factor behind the birth of modern art, which has abandoned arguments for objective beauty in favour of differentiation by any means possible. This has created a powerful symbiosis between the artist, a quintessentially bourgeois character, and the aristocrat. The aristocrat will buy some of the aura of the artist, and the artist will receive validation. With the purchase, the aristocrat signals to the artist that the artist is a genius, and the artist signals to the aristocrat that the aristocrat has exceptional, noble tastes. 

Yet, an autistic observer may conclude that the modern artist could sell a dried turd to a wealthy housewife if he can somehow attach a ribbon saying “exclusive fine art” on it. And she will pay six figures for it, too. Granted, attaching the ribbon may require brilliance of its own. The piece must not be easily replicable. What helps is that having such pieces in one’s home runs counter to traditional bourgeois values. In other words, turd art is transgressive. 

Despite the negatives of modernity, as a bourgeois, I feel like I am living in pretty good times. I am grateful for the material prosperity and the expanded opportunities that the bourgeois era has brought about. I can afford a certain amount of personal fiefdom that saves me from spiralling mimetic crises. Among the rich acquaintances I have made, a surprising proportion I found boring or odd. Upon closer thought, the proportion is surprising because it more or less matches the proportion of the general population that I find boring and odd. This anti-climatic assessment of the rich is not a judgment on their character; it merely suggests that mimetic models of today’s bourgeois such as myself are often not to be found within the upper classes. When the bourgeois daydream today, they envision icons from popular culture or arts, rather than dukes and duchesses. Isn’t this a good thing? 

I’ve read somewhere a prayer that God makes us neither poor, so that we despise Him, nor rich, so that we forget Him. I like that prayer. As long as we manage to moderate our mimetic tendencies through the cultivation of the spirit, being a bourgeois can be a wonderful thing. 

Read more in the book Catharses.