A Conversation with René Girard: (August 2006/May 2007)

PR:

As you know, I've recently attempted to connect your thought to the intellectual tradition of media ecology. Do you have any thoughts regarding that portrayal?

RG:

Well, I felt that you say many things with which I agree, and of course the tradition which provides your general view is a little alien to me. How well known is it? Is it for these people that you want to interview me, for the people who belong to that tradition?

PR:

Well, to answer your first question, Christine Nystrom aptly describes media ecology as the study of the interactions between communication forms, technologies, techniques and processes, and human thought, feeling, value, and behavior, but it is not very well known in fact as a "school" of thought. Readers, however, might be aware of the work of scholars associated with it, such as Lewis Mumford, Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan, Jacques Ellul, Walter Ong, Jack Goody, and Neil Postman. ¹ It's Postman, actually, who can properly be seen to be an "exponent" of the tradition, founding at New York University the first and only graduate program dedicated to its formal study. But you refer in your own work to thinkers such as Gregory Bateson and Kenneth Burke, who are also associated with the media ecology tradition.

With regard to your second question, I suppose it's probably largely for myself that I want to interview you, because there are other things that I'm interested in that fall outside of the particular piece that I've written concerning your work. But I think it will be of interest to others as well, including "Girardians."

RG:

Perhaps my general unfamiliarity with the tradition may limit the scope of my answers. Probably you can direct your questions in such a way that you can tell me if there are any problems, in order to improve the relationship with the other tradition.

PR:

In "René Girard as Media Ecologist," ² I was primarily interested in illustrating two things. First, the relevance of mimetic theory for any scholar of communication, particularly media ecologists, who generally share the breadth of your anthropological perspective. But then I also wanted to illustrate, of course, how media ecological observations bring effective nuance to the mimetic theory.

A couple of weeks ago I had dinner with my master's thesis supervisor—he's actually a scholar of Gerard Manley Hopkins—and I was telling him about your ideas. He was both curious and a little unsettled about the idea of human cultural origins beginning in violence, and he was asking, what does René Girard say about Eden and the Fall of Mankind? And it occurred to me afterwards that the mimetic theory really begins, I think, with the Fall. Does it not?

RG:

Yes, it would be true. But from a Christian point of view one might say that mimetic violence can be regarded as an interpretation of the original sin. It fits very well in the sense that it would account for the fact that everybody is part of the original sin, even if not a part in actuality of committing a specific action. The very fact that mimetic elements are always present in human action and interaction implies a possibility of rivalry and violence which is common to all people and which is not dependent on any sort of specific action which can be reported.

PR:

You've written in Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World [1978] that by invoking the notion of metaphysical desire, you're not in any way giving in to metaphysics. And you explain that notions such as honor and prestige have no tangible reality, but they're created by rivalry.

RG:

Well, metaphysical desire is an anti-metaphysical notion, in the sense that this desire is always a mirage. Did you think that I belong to the school that denies metaphysics completely . . . Derrida and company . . . deconstruction? I'm not giving in to the metaphysics of mimetic desire but, of course, it's not necessarily true of other types of metaphysics. See what I...