THOMAS F. BERTONNEAU at The Brussels Journal writes again on the French thinker René Girard’s conception of the isolated ego of modernity. Girard’s ideas help explain the fever pitch of high-tech connectedness and consumerism. Dr. Bertonneau writes:

The entire modern scheme of “getting and spending” depends on the industrial manipulation of what Girard calls internal mediation. All “consumers” are nowadays Emma Bovary or Dostoyevsky’s “Underground Man.”

Cell phones and basketball shoes exemplify the mimetic trend. Both items have occasioned violence all the way to homicide, basketball shoes most conspicuously, but also cell phones. Given the intensity of advertising for these two commodities, such violence must surprise no one. It is the same violence, moreover, that arose from Cain’s jealousy when God’s admiration for Brother Abel’s animal offering appeared, from Cain’s perspective, to have made Abel the monopolist of charisma. Who can bear to stand next to the monopolist of charisma? The cell phone differs from the pair of basketball shoes only in being itself a medium of mediation, responding constantly to the user’s worry about what to desire, and inundating her with seductive images and verbal provocations thereto.

 I recommend the whole article, but here are some especially pithy excerpts:

In both the Pagan order and the medieval Christian order, people grasped nature as vital and as having a reciprocal relation with the individual human being. This perception is rooted partly in the agricultural pattern of the classical and medieval societies, but also powerfully intuitive irrespective of its context. Human beings under this intuition share the cosmos with other beings of various hierarchical orders, some of whom exert influence on people, as the planets and stars supposedly do according to the precepts of astrology. One need not take the propositions of the astrologer literally in acknowledging that, even by modern, skeptical criteria, his nowadays much-disparaged cosmic science grasps an essential truth: That every creature has an environment, with whose fluctuations the creature’s life remains intimately entangled.

[…]

The modern mentality studies the landscape and exploits it, but acknowledges no meaning in it until latterly so-called cognitive science explains consciousness itself as nothing but a meaningless algorithm.

All college and university instructors will testify to the sociological fact that today’s students are obsessed with their cell phones. Why should this be so? What is that urgent as to require such continuous instrumental vigilance?

[…]

Emma’s teenaged reading in the convent-school, as Flaubert writes, consisted of books that “were all love, lovers, sweethearts, persecuted ladies fainting in lonely pavilions, postilions killed at every stage, horses ridden to death on every page, sombre forests, heartaches, vows, sobs, tears and kisses, little skiffs by moonlight, nightingales in shady groves, ‘gentlemen’ brave as lions, gentle as lambs, virtuous as no one ever was, always well dressed, and weeping like fountains.” These same books, however, present characters and events as belonging to this world, and thus as coeval with the reader, and real; they therefore incite a naïve and unfulfillable expectation in the subject, who begins to measure herself against the propinquity of those benchmarks.

Whereas Quixote’s mediators, the peers of chivalric fiction, stand distant from him, both in time and stature, Emma Bovary’s stand close to her; so much so that she readily identifies them with actual others in her living environment, or at least with those who hover noticeably around its fringes. Indeed, the authors of such seduction-narratives intend their characters to resemble the reader’s friends and neighbors because they understand the fascination of the romance-reader with the familiar – with herself and with those near to her.

[…]

Girard writes how the modern consciousness “renounces the divine mediator only to fall back on the human mediator.” In another formula, Girard asserts that, “Denial of God does not eliminate transcendency but diverts it from the au-delà to the en-deçà.” Christianity cannot exclude mimesis, but it can channel mimesis by directing the subject to imitate the maximally distant model, the Second Person of the Trinity, who in turn desires only to imitate the First Person of the Trinity. To direct one’s attention to God through the Son opens the way to the liberation of the soul from its enslavement to men. The modern consciousness, which has been in rivalry with God since the time of Friedrich Nietzsche at least, exalts the divinity of its own ego, and then wonders why, despite the rhetorical glamour of its syllogisms, it nevertheless fails actually to feel as its own the Being of God. A whole degraded politics of endless complaint has grown out of this failure, attributing what is often called privilege to its targeted malefactors. The subject cannot maintain the illusion of having acquired Being from its dispossessed monopolist and invariably collapses into panic. Romantic deception even goes so far as to validate panic, describing it under the allurement of the abyss, as though that might save the situation. Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and various French deconstructionists have extolled and still today extol the abyss.

[…]

In Things Hidden, Girard writes: “Modern people still fondly imagine that their discomfort and unease is a product of the strait-jacket that religious taboos, cultural prohibitions and, in our day, even the legal forms of protection guaranteed by the judiciary place upon desire. They think that once this confinement is over, desire will be able to blossom forth [and that] its wonderful innocence will finally be able to bear fruit.” The modern subject, wanting liberté, inveterately seeks liberation and just as inveterately experiences the belaboring frustration of its every liberating triumph. The “Declaration of Sentiments” (1848) of the Seneca Falls Convention of early feminists employs the essential “liberationist” vocabulary: “Disenfranchisement,” “social and religious degradation,” a mass of the “oppressed,” whose constituents “feel… aggrieved” and who want “rights and privileges” wickedly withheld by malefactors. The male oppressor, as the document asserts, “Has usurped the prerogative of Jehovah himself, claiming it as his right to assign for [the generic woman] a sphere of action, when that belongs to her conscience and her God.” In her much-celebrated speech on the same occasion, Elizabeth Cady Stanton invoked the image of the sovereign self in its absoluteness: “There is a solitude… more inaccessible than the ice-cold mountains, more profound than the midnight sea,” which neither “eye nor touch of man or angel has ever pierced.”

The themes of the usurpation of being and of the radical autonomy of the individual, Girard’s self-inflating quasi-divine ego, come into their necessary conjunction at the inception of what would later take the name of women’s liberation.

[…]

In order to believe in the liberating justice of its antinomianism, the modern mentality, according to Girard, must “adhere to the most excessive individualism, one that presupposes the total autonomy of individuals, that is, the autonomy of their desires.” The overwhelming testimony of tradition and experience, however, says the opposite: “If individuals are naturally inclined to desire what their neighbors possess, or to desire what their neighbors even simply desire, this means that rivalry exists at the very heart of human social relations.” Girard thus sees the Tenth Commandment as addressing “the number one problem of every human community: internal violence,” as driven by the hard-wired human tendency towards acquisitive mimesis. Indeed, as Girard argues, when the subject imitates the model, the model, noticing the imitation, redoubles his demonstrative interest in the inciting chattels, “and so the intensity of desire keeps increasing.” Such mutual reinforcement leads to the “double idolatry of self and other.”

[…]

Even more than the writers of the romance-novels that finally made Madame Bovary so miserable, the techno-mages of modern advertising know how to locate their protagonists within the circle of the subject’s own intimate and familiar environment. Even more than those writers, the techno-mages know how to provoke the subject into a pitch of covetousness whereupon it becomes possible to sell the subject those proper accouterments of the model that seem to enlarge the model’s Being, and whose possession might transfer Being to the subject. The entire modern scheme of “getting and spending” depends on the industrial manipulation of what Girard calls internal mediation. All “consumers” are nowadays Emma Bovary or Dostoyevsky’s “Underground Man.”

Cell phones and basketball shoes exemplify the mimetic trend. Both items have occasioned violence all the way to homicide, basketball shoes most conspicuously, but also cell phones. Given the intensity of advertising for these two commodities, such violence must surprise no one. It is the same violence, moreover, that arose from Cain’s jealousy when God’s admiration for Brother Abel’s animal offering appeared, from Cain’s perspective, to have made Abel the monopolist of charisma. Who can bear to stand next to the monopolist of charisma? The cell phone differs from the pair of basketball shoes only in being itself a medium of mediation, responding constantly to the user’s worry about what to desire, and inundating her with seductive images and verbal provocations thereto. Most of the mediators are simply peers, other cell-phone owners, as clueless as the subject, but some are university-trained predatory specialists, the professional marketers. The marketers hide among the “tweeters” waiting in ambush to exploit their consumer-impulse. The vacuity of media culture beggars description. So does its venality. In the much-coveted, latest model of the “high-end” cell phone, mediated desire becomes one with the technologized scientistic globalism. The subject can nowadays import his internal mediators across any distance at the speed of light or they can impose themselves on him with equal celerity.

[..]

In the modern world, the liberal utopia of unfettered desire, Cain murders Abel every day, despite the fact that mass production of consumer objects makes things common and banal – that is, devalues them until they have no intrinsic meaning. Paradoxically, the meaningless thing, whether it be an item of shoes or attire or some electronic gadget, can assume a meaning equivalent to the totality of existence, simply because someone else than the subject possesses it. “This is not just about the robbery of an object with a defined value,” as the blogger “Sneaker Freaker” writes (24 August 2012) in reference to a bloody crime; “it’s a form of someone making a status statement and making others envious of what they [sic] have in that moment, then someone taking that object by dominant force.” More recently (15 November 2013) the New York Times reports how a type of winter jacket called “the Biggie,” which sold through its exclusive retailer for nearly seven hundred dollars, became a “mark of status.” After occasioning a spate of bad publicity, the Times avers, “The jacket was withdrawn from sale… joining the dubious category of clothing items so desirable that people will kill for them.”

Homicide-thefts are merely among the most extreme of social phenomena that knowledge of the ontological sickness explains. Everywhere in contemporary society one may observe the Withdrawal of Being, but not in the mystical way described by Heidegger and his followers in their post-metaphysical tracts. The modern subject has suffered this withdrawal, and the Being that it concerns is his own. The loosing of all fetters has reduced the subject to a HAL-like locus of perception and emotion, whose chief perception is that others lay claim to the charisma that ought, under his notion of justice, to belong to him; and whose chief emotion is chafing outrage against that injustice. The modern subjectless subject, who seems to exist in a hellishly reduced way in and through her cell phone, enters a vicious circle, which Things Hidden since the Beginning of the World calls “cyclothymia,” from thumos or “pride”: “Even if he holds himself to be persecuted,” i.e., a victim of misappropriation and one of the disinherited, “the subject will ask himself [whether] the model has not got perfectly good reasons for denying him the object.” The model’s possession of the object can only signify “the difference between… the model’s fullness of being and the imitator’s nothingness.”

[…]

The dissolution of borders, the non-enforcement of immigration laws, and indeed the encouragement of massive unregulated immigration, belong to the ontological sickness. In this case, the presumed experience, on the part of the presumably excluded Others, of a lack of Being becomes the vicarious occasion for a demand to permit those Others to access Being by crossing, and thereby annihilating, a line of interdiction. Whether or not those Others have actually experienced the subjective lack of Being attributed to them by their advocates or whether they merely mimic a verbal rationale in order to seize a windfall is irrelevant. (Being human, they have experienced mediated desire in respect of something and can transfer the cathexis readily.) Border-crashers and opportunists enter the national political rivalry; an influx of unassimilated foreigners who are actively discouraged from assimilating invariably serves the politics of resentment. The myth of the antinomian utopia claims that all difficulties in a society stem from the blocking-action of a traditional regime, one that has the temerity to prohibit and one that monopolizes status.

— Comments —

Mike writes:

I was particularly struck by this passage in Dr. Bertonneau’s article.

“All college and university instructors will testify to the sociological fact that today’s students are obsessed with their cell phones. Why should this be so? What is that urgent as to require such continuous instrumental vigilance? Barfield’s interpretation of modernity offers an explanation why late-adolescents are so fixated on handheld communication technology. They are the isolated ego, trapped in the granitic keep of the Cartesian cogito and they are desperately, blindly calling into the void for redemption from their imprisonment. “

There’s a lot to unpack in the language, but maybe the explanation is simple. People have always sought out social interaction at the expense of their other obligations. Attending a class or meeting with one eye on the phone gives people a way to do this in a socially acceptable way. In other words, it’s a 21st century form of hooky, and it deserves similar treatment.

Dr. Bertonneau writes:

The reader writes: “There’s a lot to unpack in the language, but maybe the explanation is simple. People have always sought out social interaction at the expense of their other obligations.  Attending a class or meeting with one eye on the phone gives people a way to do this in a socially acceptable way.  In other words, it’s a 21st century form of hooky, and it deserves similar treatment.”

I wish I could share the reader’s mitigating view of the phenomenon, but I cannot.  Students still play hooky (absenteeism is a problem through the state-college systems).  Students still chatter in the classroom although over the last ten years the chattering problem has noticeably diminished in proportion as the cell phone problem has increased.  This is what I would expect.  Chattering is misbehavior albeit disruptive but despite being anti-social it remains ineradicably social – two people talking to one another face-to-face.  Cell phone obsession is at once anti-social in its effect, being just as disruptive as chattering, and weirdly un-social in its character.  It is un-social in being so bodiless and abstract and in being so elsewhere-directed, an aspect of its constitution that puts it in relation with desire.  The classroom cell phone abuser is saying (no doubt among many other things): There is no Being here, wherever I am now; so Being must lie elsewhere and maybe one of my cell phone contacts can tell me where.  The cell phone abuser is a subject constantly losing himself – just as Girard describes in his analysis of mediated desire.

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