René Girard and the Rhetoric of Consumption

Abstract

has fields work yet to in of be theology, Rene recognized Girard, in anthropology, or so applied productively in the in field literature, applied of in to so name many studies. different a few Yet fields in theology, in anthropology, in literature, to name a few has to be recognized or applied i th field of studies. Yet there exists, I argue, a need precisely for Girard's theories as the over 2000year-old discipline enters the twenty-first century Girard's theory of mimetic or triangular desire can be used as a model for understanding persuasion, because it is, among other things, an expression of a basic set of ideas on . . . the dynamics of the self and human relations (1996, vii). Girard's concern is with human relationships and, in a sense, with how individuals in these relationships act rhetorically upon themselves and others. Girard's mimetic theory hinges on the dynamics of imitation and explains how individuals relate through both the conscious and the unconscious sharing of behaviors, attitudes, and beliefs in certain situations. These situations are clearly rhetorical, as can be seen by examining the definition of the rhetorical set forth by Lloyd Bitzer, in his seminal 1968 article, The Rhetorical Situation. Bitzer proposes three conditions that must be met for a situation to exist: an exigency or imperfection marked by urgency; a audience or an audience that can act; and constraints, or elements that have the power to constrain the decision and action needed to modify the exigency (7). In mass-mediated modern rhetoric, I argue that the exigencies exist externally (in the culture) and internally, the audience is both others and self, and the constraints are the alienation, mystification, and desire generated by hierarchies. Twentieth-century theorist Kenneth Burke advises that we must often think of rhetoric not in terms of some one particular address, but as a general body of identifications that owe their convincingness much more to trivial repetition and dull daily reenforcement than to exceptional skill (1950, 26). Such is the case with this particular form of rhetoric, which is generated and propagated by mimetic contagion and thus is best more narrowly defined as sociological propaganda, a type of propaganda