Mark of Cain

Abstract

Violence presents a paradox. There is evidence that violence is universal in all in human societies. However, in writing mostly from the standpoint of relatively peaceful social spaces, violence often appears exceptional, and a product of the breakdown of integrating social institutions and conventions. Norbert Elias persuasively identified growing thresholds of repugnance towards violence with the transition to modernity, although understanding the balance between formalization and informalization poses some critical questions about his thesis. The discussion begins with these as a means of opening a broader discussion of theories of violence which are developed through a critical analysis of Girard’s and Gans’ theories. It is argued that these may offer a way of addressing the informalization problem in a context of mimetic consumption desires in a context of apparent but false equalization in contemporary societies.

Keywords

Elias formalization Gans Girard informalization social theory violence

Although violence has been addressed by a wide range of social and political theorists including Hobbes, Burke, Marx, Durkheim, Weber, Freud, Foucault, Giddens, Girard, Žižek and many others, violence has not, at least until recently perhaps, been a topic of central concern in sociological theory. It has rather been parcelled out into areas such as violent crime and social conflict perhaps because as Delanty (2001) points out, sociology emerged in relatively peaceful times and was animated by a vision of social order within a world of internally pacified nation states. Yet many writers, but particularly anthropologists (e.g., Abbink, 2000: xi) note that violence is a human universal and interpersonal aggression, physical threat, assault, homicide and armed conflict ‘seem to have existed in all known human societies’. However, it is often imagined, notably in Elias’s civilizing process thesis, that modernity entailed processes of pacification of interpersonal relations. Many explanations then regard violence as a ‘falling away from the good’ (Vetlesen, 2005: 105) where violence enters the spaces vacated by crises of institutional governance, legality, civic trust and legitimate power. However, violence is embedded in complex ways in multiple social and cultural processes.

When violent contagion spread through London and other English cities in August 2011, in a context of economic depression, collapsing social support and welfare infrastructures, its main targets were not political buildings and symbols but looting of high quality branded consumer goods that denote status and power in a culture that promotes their value above everything else. This article argues that violence can be understood in a context of apparent but false equalization set against consumer desire, shame and mimesis. It begins with the problem of informalization in Elias, then discusses Girard’s claim that human violence is the result of mimetic rivalry as the necessary consequence of imitating another’s desire for an object that cannot be shared. This claim is evaluated in its own terms and with reference to contemporary post-sacral patterns of interpersonal violence where the promise of the bonne heure of equalization and informality is in contrast to growing inequality and spatially differentiated exclusion.

Elias’s informalization problem

For Elias, informalization was the ‘hallmark of the civilizing process’ (Misztal, 2000: 76) but understanding the balance of formality and informality in a wider social context is crucial. Indeed as Misztal (2000: 43ff) argues, informalization brings higher structural insecurity and requires the development of civility, sociability and intimacy. Violence is complexly related to social divisions, social distance, hierarchy and ritual aspects of life. Deep social divisions can generate conflict and violence although social distance can also regulate desires. Vaughan (2002), for example, notes that while ‘the valet never desired what the master desires’, competitive desire increases with greater social equalization. Similarly, Gould (2003: 17) argued, that ‘much of human conflict occurs when relations involving rank are ambiguous or under challenge’, because struggles about dominance are particularly likely in relations that are symmetrical or are undergoing instability (Gould, 2003: 66). Further, he notes that while a contrast is often drawn between pre-modern ‘honour’ societies and modern instrumental ones, this is over-drawn since at a deeper level these worlds resemble one another. Economic rewards do not sufficiently account for modern competitiveness, which is tied to systems for allocating rank and status across all areas of society, from bureaucratic organizations to street gangs (2003: 19).

In the first phase of Elias’s civilizing process repugnance towards physical violence increased as a consequence of centralization of the means of violence in the state, extended figurations, combined with more mannered courtesies and hierarchies, increased body shame, and circumspection and self-control in everyday interactions. A reduction in interpersonal violence was linked to increased self-reflexivity around the body and more formalized, mannered conduct in public life. Among social elites a dominant code of honour and fighting prowess was replaced by increased empathy, self-restraint and legality. The practice of duelling, for example, which infringes the state’s monopoly of violence, was underpinned by a warrior honour code in which declining the challenge ‘meant losing everything’ (Elias, 1994: 70). By contrast, in modern societies, with increased availability of the law to all strata, more formalized rules of conduct, and functional democratization, many disputes are more peacefully resolved. As Cooney (2003) also argues, once upper classes are subject to the law, violence becomes less socially acceptable, and when the lower classes have access to the law ‘aggressive tactics such as fighting, burning, seizing and killing to resolve conflicts’ decrease. Power differentials between different strata decrease while self-restraint in dealings with subordinates replaces an attitude of ‘do as you want’ (Elias, 1994: 33–4). At the same time, between the Renaissance and the end of the nineteenth century, the formalizing of manners and disciplining of emotions generated new social divisions and vast psychical repression, that Freud ‘discovered’ at the point where it had reached its peak (Wouters, 2007: 30). But this was also a process, as Scheff (2004) notes, in which the aura of embarrassment surrounding sexuality and the body ‘went underground’ so that not only was shame attached to unruly desires but the feelings of shame themselves were repressed and unacknowledged.

However, the increased self-control that was a prerequisite for more complex figurations also underpinned the second phase of the process that involved a partial reversal of formalization. Growing informalization from around the 1960s in Europe entailed relaxation of controls, less stiff norms of social conduct, reduced status differences, less body shame and a ‘controlled decontrolling’ of affects based on increased self-control (Elias, 1994: 35–7). Wouters (2007: 57) argues that, later in the twentieth century, social interweaving necessitated more social mixing and presumed all involved would overcome mutual suspicions. Crucially for the discussion here this also involved the twentieth-century ideal of the classless society along with increasing familiarity in everyday life, the use of the informal pronoun, first name terms, and what Goffman (1959: 83) called ‘intimacy without warmth’. Mennell (1992: 241–6) argues that although informalization induces greater insecurity, since much more has to be worked out by actors themselves, boundaries are maintained through the exercise of increased self-restraint. However, informalization brings new risks, for example, of immediate verbal aggression and an ‘ongoing emancipation of emotions’. Further, for Wouters, ‘controlled decontrolling’ came to an end in the 1980s in the wake of neoliberal destruction of social bonds and the triumph of a culture of unrestrained affects, summarized by the slogan ‘greed is good’.¹ Stimulated desires in the unrestrained culture of money, combined with rising inequalities, increase the risk of conflicts, social uncertainties and the construction of new enemies and scapegoats (Wouters, 2007: 196). This is developed further, below.

Informalization could then either represent a continuation of the civilizing process or, in certain conditions it could represent its reversal, becoming a harbinger of increased violence and disorder. If violence diminishes with increasingly mannered and calculative habitus, then the weakening and informalization of these, especially associated with deregulation of affects, could generate increased readiness to aggression too. Lasch (1979), for example, suggested that loss of social bonds combined with a culture of instant gratification encourages narcissism and vague feelings of emptiness. Kilminster (2008) similarly suggests that new pleasures might be derived from contemplating scenes of violence that people in the recent past would have found repugnant. This perhaps happens in a similar way to what Tom Wolfe (1976) called ‘pornoviolence’, that gratifies audiences with the promise of disclosing gruesome details, thus degenerating to the level of sadistic sensationalism. Wolfe suggests that television violence is then seen from the weapon’s point of view – for the satisfaction of the one with the power to destroy. Written over thirty years ago, his concern about media violence of the time seems quaint when compared with current videogames, ‘torture porn’ (such as Hostel, 2005) and real-time footage of missiles hitting targets. At the same time, niche markets will cater for diverse tastes in a situation of high commercial penetration in everyday life and ‘emancipation of emotions’. While formality of manners and conventions inhibit dangerous affects through taboos, informality and ‘transgressive’ media risks a commercially engendered jouissance of violent emotions. This could in Girard’s terms be described as a release of triangular mimetic desires in a context of absent sacrificial resolution.

However, whether this is actually what results from informalization may be dependent on the wider institutional context. Thome (2007) addressed the rise in homicide rates in economically advanced nations in the second half of the twentieth century that followed several centuries of decline.² His key thesis is that the pacifying effects of the erosion of traditional collectivism (i.e. increased informality) can be maintained only so long as ‘cooperative individualism’, that respects the individual as the carrier of universal rights and obligations, prevails over forces of ‘disintegrative individualism’, or chronic anomie. He argues that market societies, without the restraint of welfare and cooperative individualism, engender anomic diffusion of desire and intense interpersonal competition. A further question here is whether the illusory promise of equality that informalization brings is in conflict with worsening inequalities, anxieties and marginalization associated with high consumption lifestyles (e.g. Smart, 2010). Might this be crucial for stimulating violent rage?

Aside from the informalization problem, there are several additional questions that are relevant to theorizing violence. First, there is the spatial differentiation of violence, and evidence that known violence frequently maps onto social inequalities in ways that generate local counter-cyclical trends.³ As Elias was aware, the civilizing process is not uniform within societies but highly differentiated, and depends on the prevailing division of labour being perceived as legitimate (Misztal, 2000: 78). In urban spaces of abandonment, social disinvestment has given rise to a ‘pandemic of violence’ especially as Wacquant (2004: 113) argues, in relation to ‘hyper-ghettoization’ in US cities. Second, these urban spaces are scenes of performative enactment of masculinities, since the street is a male space of contestation and violence can be a means of validation of hegemonic masculinity (Connell and Messerschmidt, 2005). This is especially so in a context of urban decay and abandonment, in which the absence of traditional outlets for employment combines with the persistence of masculine cultural goals that are realized via illicit dealings and activities (Nayak, 2006). Third, despite the importance for Elias of shame as an inhibitor of unruly affects, he did not consider the cyclical relationships between shame, humiliation and extreme violence (e.g. Katz, 1988; Gilligan, 2000, 2004; Scheff, 2000; Ray et al., 2004). Fourth, as Turner (2003) notes, there is no treatment of the civilizational influence of religion, which Elias regarded as a reflection of other social processes – ‘religion is always exactly as “civilized” as the society or class which upholds it’ (1994: 169). Finally, central to Elias’s understanding of violence is affect control, but as an explanation of violence this is limited. Elias and others note how carnivals of violence such as public executions were common in the pre- and early modern periods, as were festivals such as the burning of live cats on Midsummer’s Eve in Paris and elsewhere (Elias, 1994: 171). But Elias saw these as ‘amusements’ and gratification of cruelty – ‘not worse than burnings of heretics, torturing and public executions but the joy of torturing living creatures without excuse before reason’ (1994: 171). However, as Tester (2004: 68–9) argues, this violence had meanings that were rooted in cultural difference and the ambiguity of cats in relation to humans in early modern Europe. Further, Elias did not consider the possible sacrificial significance of summoning the social presence through violent ritual. This coincided with the period of the ‘witch crazes’ in which the destruction of witches and heretics were scapegoating/sacrificial rituals that affirmed a collective presence of a patriarchal-religious political order threatened by social changes that were hardly understood – such as the emerging market cycles. Ciuba (2007: 14) argues the carnival permissiveness of festivals thus gives dispensation to the violation of everyday customs that recalls the chaos prior to the foundation of social order. But this is no benign release of repressed energies since the ‘crowd in lynching mood is supreme power’ (Ciuba, 2007: 214). The sacrificial meanings of violence will now be discussed further.

Violence and the scenic imagination

The observation that public spectacles of cruelty have sacrificial significance is central to Girard’s theory of the sacrifice/scapegoat. For Girard, it is naïve to imagine that violence is contained by greater humanitarianism, affect controls and complex configurations. Girard’s reconstruction of a primal landscape identifies a cultural dynamic of violence in which desire originates in mimesis.⁴ He proposes that we learn to desire what another, whom one takes as a model, desires. An object has some value only because it is desired by another, which leads to conflict of desire for the same object, since ‘Two desires converging on the same object are bound to clash’ (Girard, 1977: 146). Moreover, desire is triangular – jealousy and envy imply a third presence, to whom envy, a feeling of impotence, is directed (Girard, 2004: 40). Not only does possession by one exclude possession by another (Kirwan, 2004: 20) but desire is detached from a predetermined object (Farneti, 2009) such that conflict cannot be resolved simply by removal of the disputed object. Ultimately, for Girard then, desire is objectless and arises from the yearning for the prestige that is attributed to the one who possesses the object. Mimesis risks ‘violent contagion’ (Girard, 1977: 28), which arises from an unresolved crisis where mimetic desire to acquire the wholeness of the other (which is experienced as a lack or incompleteness of oneself) leads to a feud between incompatible rivals. By simultaneously taking the other as a model and obstacle, subjects form ‘violent doubles’ locked in a feud in which one’s enfranchisement requires another’s disenfranchisement. The scene is then set for irreconcilable, spiralling mimetic violence and chaos that can be arrested only by the scapegoat mechanism.

Thus, many creation myths tell of a dismembered deity from whose broken body the world was created. Rome was founded after Romulus slew his brother Remus, and as Ricoeur (2010) says, ‘behind Rome there was Troy, represented by Aeneas carrying his father Anchises on his back. And, under Troy, how many buried foundations?’⁵ For Girard, these myths disguise sacrificial violence which must be both forgotten and ritualized. Forgotten, because scapegoating is never an activity anyone will acknowledge taking part in, and ritualized in order to perpetuate the ‘unanimity that springs from the murder of a surrogate victim’ (2004: 26–7). Myths bind communities and symbolically discharge rage while disguising the original sacrifice-murder. The conditions for selecting a scapegoat are that it is neither too close nor too distant: ‘fundamentally a member of the community, a neighbour of those destined to kill him’ (Girard, 1977: 278) but nonetheless different and unlikely to either take revenge or evoke sympathy (Praeg, 2007: 43).⁶

For Girard, sacrificial murder whereby violent crisis is resolved is the origin of religion, politics and social institutions. The story of Cain is an allegory of the violence at the heart of the social that exposes and, for Girard, denounces perils of violent reciprocity. Violence (and religion) were central in the formation of human culture and society, and ‘All the elements of the violent origin of civilization are present in this text’ (Pattillo, 2004). Cain (קין qyn = spear) murders his brother and rival, Abel, and goes on to found the first city, for Girard mythically associating civilization with violence.⁷ The mark of Cain, the warning that whoever slays Cain will unleash violence sevenfold, is apparently his protection against random violence but, as Wetzel (2006) suggests, it is actually a ‘sign of violence to come’. Cain’s killer will unleash multiplying violence which culminates in a blood feud through several generations. His descendant Lamech claims to have ‘killed a man for wounding me/ Even a young man for hurting me/ If Cain shall be avenged sevenfold/ Then Lamech seventy-sevenfold’ (Genesis 4: 23–4). Thus, Lamech’s life is determined by his past and a community founded on blood feud is destined to repeat it. Girard sees the flood that destroys Cain’s line as a metaphor of an escalating spiral of mimetic violence. According to Pattillo (2004), Girard sees the acceptability of Abel’s blood sacrifice as an indication of the sacrificial protection on which all social order will be founded. The violence of all against all will be kept in check by the ritualized violence of all against one. This unity through violence allows for the development of what is collectively termed ‘civilization’ and the emerging legal codes address that which must be prohibited to maintain that peace.

The victim is first demonized by the group; the group members see it as responsible for causing the social crisis, and they kill it. Once killed, however, the victim is then worshipped by the group as a harbinger of peace. That is, violence is sacred. Sacrifice brings relief because collective disorder is transferred to the victim, but its vitality depends on ability to conceal the displacement. (Girard, 2004: 75)

Rituals then seek to recollect something they never succeeded in comprehending (p. 27). When violence is collective and unanimous, the victim has become a collective embodiment of all scandals and their personal liberation.⁸ However, the sacrificial resolution is always unstable and scapegoating is prone to sacrificial crises and spiralling violence, which in a culture born of violence ‘inadequately contained’ will escape and propagate (p. 151). Resonant in some ways with the possible decivilizational consequences of informalization, Girard (pp. 108–9) suggests that in a societal crisis involving a loss of distinctions, time sequences shorten, negative exchanges increase with a reciprocity of insults, blows, revenge, and lack of pity, while, powerless in the face of the eclipse of culture, victims are constructed as potentially threatening and become objects of persecution.

This analysis presupposes societies that are governed by sacred rites, but how might these processes operate in modern, post-sacral societies? Girard writes of a ‘radical demythification’ of the sacred and eventual elimination of vengeance and reprisal (Girard, 1987: 195) through an ethos of empathy with the victim. For Girard, the Gospels expose the scapegoating mechanism, which only works so long as it is unacknowledged and once it is revealed in post-traditional societies, violence can no longer cast out violence. However, the decomposition of the sacrificial order in itself does not mean that violence diminishes, but on the contrary, the absence of sacrificial displacement increasingly threatens the resurgence of mimetic crises on a catastrophic scale (Girard, 1987: 440). Indeed, secularization has not eliminated the possibility of ‘violent unanimity’, such as that after 9/11, which as Skerrett (2003) argues, ‘made it impossible to notice that the Talban and Afghan people were surrogate victims, used to relieve the intolerable tensions of rivalry and vengefulness’.

Nonetheless Eric Gans, Girard’s former student and colleague, criticizes Girard’s neglect of the specific conditions of modernity. Gans develops a variant of Girard’s hypothesis via ‘the most significant exercises of the scenic imagination’ (Gans, 2008: 20) from social contract theorists such as Hobbes through to Durkheim, Freud and Boas. Gans links mimetic theory with evolutionary approaches to human behaviour, constructing the sudden event of language as a ‘scene of origins’ that was simultaneously a deferment of violence. Like Girard, Gans (2008: 15) argues that religion captures a key element of humanity’s ‘scenic origin’. Describing himself as a ‘cultural creationist’, he says that the appearance of language was a Girardian event, more particularly, a ‘speciation event’ in that with the birth of the sign came a new symbolic consciousness. At the point of language emergence, Gans (1999) says, ‘the genetic constitution of the participants themselves was not modified. But from this modest but not imperceptible beginning, the creators of the new symbolic culture separated themselves off from other bands of hominids who did not have such a culture.’ Again like Hobbes, prior to speech, there is no peace of human culture but rather a state of violence. Like Girard, Gans sees imitation as leading to rivalry and disagreements over objects, culminating in an event in which crisis polarizes violence and where murder can be an act of solidarity among the group (Gans, 1981: 12). But for him the resolution is through language, which releases an ethical capacity for conflict avoidance (1981: 41).⁹ For example, in a primal hunting scene, the attractiveness of a mammal’s carcass intensifies as each member of a primal group desires to consume it, which threatens violent competition. But naming the object also signifies the desired object as sacred and subject to prohibition. The capacity of language to represent without appropriating permits deferral of violence and the inappropriateness of the sign constitutes the sacred object (1981: 35). The linguistic form imposes structures of mediation on desire, so, for example, the representation and rituals of ‘food’ evolved into a linguistic form bearing a new temporality of deferment. The hunt ends with a sparagmos, dismemberment and eating, thus releasing desire, but mediated by ritual. The sacrifice meal enabled eating, sharing and taking it home rather than devouring prey on the spot, and these ethical norms were reinforced through ritual (Gans, 2008). Following Durkheim, the power of the sacred object derives from the community but also calls into being the community as renouncement of instinct (1981: 70). Individual self-consciousness is also born at this moment, in the recognition of alienation from the sacred centre. Language and prohibitions in sacred rituals thus signal the birth of ethics and a break with pre-human existence.

However, Gans departs further from Girard in his contrast between highly sacralized and centralized societies, practising sacred sacrifice, with ‘centre-less’, market societies with multiple forms of conflict mediation. The only ‘evolution the rite undergoes is gradual draining away of the truth of which it was its task to preserve’ (Gans, 1990: 16–17) and the market is a moment in the ‘final liberation of language from the confines of the sacred’ (Gans, 2008). In parallel with Simmel on the translation of qualitative into quantitative via money, Gans suggests that, like language, market exchange has developed to address the potential for violence in the unchecked augmentation of resentment. The purpose of the market, he suggests, is to make things as reproducible as words so that the exchange of things, under the sign of money, is as easy as the exchange of words in conversation. Indeed, according to Gans (1995):

The market system that promotes the creation and circulation of such differences operates on the inherently fallible basis of economic judgment. In contrast with the preestablished differential roles of ritual societies, the values of the marketplace are determined a posterior through exchange. Laws maintain the boundaries of the exchange operation; they do not touch its central core. In principle, market transactions are non-coercive: with some well-defined exceptions, I can offer whatever I please at the price I choose.

In other words, market societies establish an ethic of equality, representation and exchange that permits desacralizaton of hierarchies and taboos. This is reflected too in changing linguistic structures such that the shift from inflected to non-inflected codes represents a ‘final liberation of language from the strict confines of the sacred and its extension to more general social usage’ (Gans, 1999). Gans (1995) further suggests that the abstract equality of status stands in for the recognition of personhood, while the historical evolution of market society generates the social equivalent of this recognition in the form of the individualized consumption patterns of modern market society. Elias also saw the market as medium of figurations and the ‘market imposes restraint and control on impulses’ (1994: 129) and contributes too to functional democratization. However, money also turns everything into a commodity unless limits are set on its dominance (Misztal, 2000: 79). This issue is reconsidered in the final section.

Sacred ritual and violence

The forgoing suggests that ritual social practices and divisions may ward off violence that threatens to reappear if cultural boundaries are eroded. However, Girard’s and Gans’ theses are clearly vulnerable to objections that need to be outlined. Generative anthropology is not anthropology but speculative hypotheses about origins of prohibitions around violence deep in human social development. As with Hobbes, there is a problem with imagining a moment of transcendence, a scenic origin, whether this is surrendering sovereignty to the state, a sacrificial murder or the invention of language. This is the problem of explaining how chaotic pre-social violence transmuted into sociality since the event presupposed the mechanisms it supposedly invents – notably that the sacrifice will be understood as such. This implies the existence of the very cultural understanding that is posited as following the event, but it cannot be the product of what it generates. The problem with Cain and Abel after all was not the absence of sacrifice (since both presumably already understood this ritual process) but the unmediated competition between their desires for divine approval. To relinquish violence, at least within the kin group, presupposes the normative and linguistic resources within which such an act has meaning. The prohibition has to be communicated and this presupposes understanding of rules and sanctions. Since language is universally complex with no evidence of intermediate syntactic stages (Gans, 1999), it further presupposes the implicit, always already capacities of speakers to adopt performative attitudes of agreement and disagreement.

Both Girard and Gans, despite their differences from Hobbes, likewise assume a primal state of unmediated violence prior to the event, in which it is hard to imagine how these hominids survived at all. Girard assumes that in the absence of sacrificial mediation, competition becomes violent and that possession by one excludes possession by another. By contrast, Collins (2008) argues that humans are ‘hard wired’ for social solidarity and that it requires an escalating interaction ritual of confrontation to overcome inhibitions and (often ineptly) enact violence. Collins (2008: 25) argues that ‘real’ violence ‘goes against the interactional grain’ and ‘the basic mechanisms of … interactional solidarity’ that render violent situations difficult. This would have equally been the case in pre-modern societies in which violence was not ‘easy and untrammelled’ (Collins, 2008: 506, n42). Violence may be always at least potentially present, but to argue this does not advance understanding of its particular manifestations. Since non-violent modes of behaviour such as altruism and conflict avoidance appear to exist among non-human apes (Aureli and de Waal, 2000), it is not fanciful to imagine that they also existed among pre- and early Homo sapiens. Further, the mutual incompatibility of competing desires can hardly be assessed independent of questions of scarcity – if there are plentiful alternatives to the mutually desired object, then conflict avoidance would be a rational strategy for both parties. Further, Girard’s (2004: 13) concept of ‘paroxystic’ mimetic rivalry is suggestive of Collins’ concept of interaction rituals that generate violent outcomes. However, the outcome of these is uncertain, and violence arising from rivalry is far from inevitable. Further, a theory of origin is not a theory of subsequent evolution and sacred rites could acquire meanings and effects different from the original.

Ritual is regarded here as a means of displacing violence but as Durkheim argued, ritual is characterized by ambiguity and while the sacred may defer violence, social rituals associated with it might be an occasion for violence too (Durkheim, 2001: 292–3). Similarly, Burkert (1983: 2) says, ‘blood and violence lurk fascinatingly at the heart of religion’, and ‘civilized life endures only by giving a ritual form to the brute force that still lurks in men’ (1983: 45). However, it is not plausible that one event, a unique occurrence, however gruesome, could assume formative significance unless repeated and incorporated into a cultural learning process.

Further, Burkert suggests that Girard does not take account of the centrality of eating to sacred ritual (1981: 35). He says this is linked to killing in the hunting order, but is one in which the quarry is ‘part of the group’ and while doomed to die, their killing is ‘a kind of parricide’ and therefore becomes sacred (1983: 75). The sacrifice is initiation into a ritual that heightens a sense of the awe of the social. In the male community, killing and eating are means of bonding and the closer the bond, the more gruesome the ritual. Further, as Wetzel (2006) comments, Girard fails to notice the violence of sacrificial ideology to women and that monotheism is the ‘apotheosis of maleness’. Burkert (1983: 58) notes the shared metaphors of sex and violence – banging, stabbing, thrusting and piercing – and that as a ‘symbol of masculinity’ the weapon has been interchangeable with the sexual organ from Stone Age drawings to modern advertising. The act of killing is thus sexually charged (often requiring abstinence prior to battle) while Greek marriage rituals also involved sacrifice rites – such as animal sacrifice, mortification and other initiations (1983: 63).

Further, Girard’s attempt to rescue Christian ritual from the scapegoat mechanism is problematic. Girard claims that, contrary to what he regards as widespread misinterpretation, the crucifixion broke the cycle of mimetic violence by revealing and renouncing the logic of vengeance. Merback (2002) points out that in sacred ritual such as the medieval Passion, violence was engendered rather than contained. ‘Supplicants,’ he says ‘were to be agitated toward feelings of guilt, the psychical bedrock of the church’s penitential system’ and the ‘burden of guilt … seems to cry out for a transfer’. Indeed,

transferred, projected and displaced it was —upon the sinners, unbelievers, the evil and the damned, in particular the Jews, the inveterate enemies of Christ and Mary that imparted to the Jew of Christian fantasy an insatiable bloodlust and a capacity for violence against the holy.

Moreover, Burkert points out that, like Freud’s primal scene in Totem and Taboo, the idea of a god that is killed and eaten but miraculously present again is a motif of the sacrifice feast (1983: 76). The Eucharist is thus a symbolic re-enactment of a sacrificial feast (the body and blood of Christ) of the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world (John 1:29). This, moreover, recapitulates and completes the Akedat Yitzchak, the binding of Isaac by Abraham. In common with many other commentaries, Girard interprets this myth too as an anti-sacrificial story, since the last-minute substitution of a ram for Isaac revealed a god who did not demand human sacrifice (e.g. Girard, 1987: 143). However, for Rubenstein (2010), the Akedah was an account of sacrifice since the killing of Isaac had already been implemented in Abraham’s surrender to the demand to commit infanticide. The link between the Akedah and Christianity is made by St Paul who depicts Christ ‘as the perfect atonement for the sins of mankind’ suggesting that, while Isaac’s Akedah was an ‘aborted Golgotha’, Jesus was ‘the perfect Isaac’ (Rubenstein, 2010).¹⁰

Non-sacrificial interpretations of myth then are questionable and the ambivalence of ritual is such that lines between deferment and enactment of violence are blurred. This does not entail rejecting all of Girard’s and Gans’ analyses of violent process but it does suggest: (a) resolution via scapegoating did not banish violence in sacral societies; and (b) in certain circumstances violence may be more widely unleashed in post-sacral societies. Incompatible mimetic desire may be a source of spiralling aggression that risks triggering chaotic violence. This idea has been productive in analysing the cultural dynamics of mimesis in ethnonational conflict, particularly where latent cultural memories and ritual associations of past harms and enemies are mobilized in the service of present conflicts, such as Bland (1997) suggests. But it may also be relevant to contemporary consumer society that releases mimetic desire as a means of profit maximization while promoting an illusion of informalization and equalization. Let us now turn to this.

Formality, informality and shame

Rituals then do not necessarily defer violence. But at the same time in post-traditional societies the market is not simply a system of semiotic signs but also allocates merit, rank and shame. Moreover, in Girard, violence appears almost to have a purely textual quality rather than being visceral, embodied and grotesquely intimate violation. The body and emotion seem remote from his accounts. In particular, repressed shame is a source of potential violence since through shame the self confronts an obstacle to realizing its self-image and violence is the desire to affirm the self. Gilligan (2004) sees this theme in the Cain and Abel narrative, since ‘the Bible makes it very clear why Cain kills Abel: “The Lord had respect unto Abel and to his offering: But unto Cain … he had not respect”. In other words God dis’ed Cain!’ who acted out lethal rage. Girard (1986: 155) says that shame is the ‘negative double of honour’ – the most mimetic of sentiments – to look at oneself through the eyes of the other. Honour is self-worth lived in the look of the other – where ‘each member [is] at once a model for everyone else and a disciple of everyone else’ (Ciuba, 2007: 21–2). Further, since shame involves displacement of affect, it is homologous to the scapegoating process. Scheff argues that shame is a ‘master emotion’ that facilitates social bonding (since it is anticipated in every interaction) but also a signal of threat to the social bond – creating alienation, estrangement and anger (e.g. Scheff and Retzinger, 2001). Because shame is a powerful negative emotion that threatens the self, it will often be repressed but will nonetheless ‘erupt as anger and disrupt social relations and … lead to high-intensity violence’ (Turner, 2007). Moreover, negative emotions will tend to be repressed and attributed to external objects, so, for example, street gangs whose members dropped out of schools often do not vent their anger at the schools but at other gangs (Turner, 2007). Katz (1988) found that in many cases of serious violence the perpetrator felt humiliated – sometimes because of actual insults; sometimes in response to imagined humiliations – but in cases of homicide, the perpetrator transforms what he perceives as an eternally humiliating situation into a blinding rage (1988: 11). Similarly Scheff (2003) argues that school ‘rampage shootings’ are perpetrated by alienated men engulfed in ‘feeing traps’ of overwhelming but unacknowledged shame and humiliation.

Shame dynamics intersect with social structures and cultural ideals of desirability and success. It has been noted above that even if scapegoating is a source of violence in pre-modern societies, this may work differently in modern ones, and Gans suggests a different trajectory of desacralization to Girard. Gans’ idealized view of the market (above) obscures the shame dynamics engendered by what could be called the false promise of equality in market societies. Advertising stimulates mimetic desires through what Simon (1999) calls ‘adtopias’, in which beautiful people are living for their own pleasure in a just and happy society, where poverty, suffering and hate do not exist but they consume compulsively. Although few people work, there are more than enough goods and services to satisfy their needs and people consume these products constantly and compulsively. Adtopias sell the illusion of fulfillment through instantaneous consumption – as Samsung put it, ‘Impatience is a Virtue’.¹¹ But further, like classical utopias, they portray situations where suffering and injustice do not exist, and escape the evils of outside society. The downside of this is that those excluded from consumption utopia will experience shame and resentment.

Robert Merton (1996: 142) famously argued that ‘despite our persisting open-class ideology, advance towards the success goal is relatively rare and notably difficult for those armed with little formal education and few economic resources’. However, Merton understood this in terms of instrumental, adaptive goal-directed action but this is also an affective process. Further, Merton did not have a theory of violence but rather of economic offending. However, consumer goods carry symbolic mimeses. Veblen (1994), for example, claimed that the wealthy consume goods in order to display their accumulation of wealth to others who are unable publicly to indicate their social worth. The ‘motive that lies at the root of ownership,’ he says, ‘is emulation’ (1994: 17), and continues that consumption confers honour and is the basis of self-esteem. However, while Veblen regarded ‘elegant’ dress as an ‘insignia of leisure’, in more informalized ‘egalitarian’ societies dressing down may be badges of status. As Girard (2003) points out in contemporary society, ‘The torn blue jeans, the ill fitting jacket, the baggy pants, the refusal to dress up, are forms of conspicuous nonconsumption.’

Veblen’s thesis inspired work, such as by Sennett and Cobb (1972) on the hidden injuries of class that provokes a class-shame dynamic. They argued that working-class men internalized blame for the lack of self-respect that arose from class, regarding this as their own fault. The ‘secret question’ they suggest everyone asks is, ‘Am I the kind of person worth loving?’ That is, do I have dignity in the eyes of the other when recognition is based on ‘badges of ability’ (1972: 62)? While class differences appear to be disappearing, there are visible differences of ‘ability’ and respect (p. 74). Further, shame is harder to pass off than guilt (p. 127) and class society takes away dignity leaving the ‘morality of anxiety’ in which ‘people turn on each other’ in bitterness and frustration (p. 186). Similarly, Scheff (2001) argues that

All classes … have problems with shame … in the ruling classes, unacknowledged shame takes the form of false pride or aggression. Covering up hidden shame with ostentatious displays of consumption, as implied by Veblen, is one such vehicle. Attacks on racial and class minorities by the reactionary rich would be an example of the shame/anger path.

Similarly, Skerrett (2003) notes that ‘the modern incitement of mimetic desire to unbridled consumer consumption has unleashed systematic violence against vulnerable communities’ because ‘extraordinary conditions of plenty’ (in the USA) have failed to diffuse the experience of desire as a lack and fuelled the richest to be most envious of goods and status when these are denied.

This theory is given added content if we map shame dynamics onto modern conditions of informality and the intersection of a shame, status and informality matrix. The unfulfilled promise of informalization and equality in the context of structural inequalities invokes shame and repressed guilt as Sennett and Cobb (1972) argue. This throws into relief the differences between hierarchical-sacred systems and informal, decracralized ones. In the past, hierarchy and rituals of prohibition regulated mimesis, and these controls continued into early consumer societies through institutional constraints on the market and limitations on credit. But consumption cultures that are unleashed by unbound credit, in which hierarchy and social distance are apparently weakened, offer the promise of equality. Meanwhile, popular culture promotes transgression of shame boundaries and the breaking of taboos, which is epitomized perhaps in ‘reality TV’ shows that create a new public spectacle of voyeurism and humiliation. Informalization combined with commercialized public spectacles might contribute to a decivilizing process, especially in social spaces of inequality and exclusion. Here, as Vaughan (2002) says, again like Veblen, consumption is enshrined as the means of satisfaction, not for use values but for the meanings conveyed by its objects. In this context, lack of success becomes a source of disgust, degradation and shame. As a consequence, mutual identification between people wanes. This analysis is in part an echo of Durkheim’s critique of atomistic individualism combined with a state of unregulated desire, generating dérèglement and liberté triste. But it can go further by focussing on the spaces and locations in which these are most acutely experienced.

Such shame-fuelled rage might be high in urban spaces of deprivation and abandonment where violence is a response to exclusion from the consumption elite that also judges them losers (e.g. Ray et al., 2004). In these contexts, young men’s performative ‘hypermasculinity seems to be a recipe for silence and violence’ (Scheff, 2006). The well-known connection between deprivation and violence is not direct but is rather mediated by complex dynamics of shame/rage provoked by the failed promise of equality. Gilligan’s (2000) analysis of extreme violence suggests that past shame from being despised (for example, because of poverty, racism, exclusion or rejection) leads to a raging desire to put an end to shame and thereby to the feeling of being mocked. However, this also seems to manifest in the projection of unacknowledged intrapsychic conflicts into available scapegoats. For example, in his study of American skinheads, Hamm (1994: 80) found a profound hopelessness mixed with rage, combined with highly conformist commitment to American cultural values (1994: 130) in which violence became a means of social bonding against a chaotic world. They aspired to the hegemonic culture of masculine achievement from which their exclusion was experienced as shame-rage. Racist hatred was then a means of displacing inner chaos onto external objects while forming close affective bonds absent elsewhere in their lives (p. 184). Nayak (2006) found in Newcastle’s post-Fordist labour market excluded men who were marginalized from cultures of consumption performed symbolic codes of violence to enhance reputations within a drinking culture, street drug scenes, and ‘hard’ masculinity. Thus, class was ‘stitched into codes of respect, accent, dress, music, bodily adornment and comportment’. The intersections of mimetic desire, informality, status anxiety, inequality and marginalization then could be the foundation of a powerful theory of violence.

Conclusion

This has been a suggestive analysis of informalization in a context of unleashing mimetic desire in consumer societies where structural inequalities belie the false promise of fulfillment. Opposed to the idea of progressive pacification, Girard’s theory of mimesis, founded like Gans, on reconstruction of a primal scene, claims that violence is embedded within the processes through which we learn to desire both objects and identities. Being a primordial threat to survival, it requires deflection through sacrifice and ritual but these remain embedded within logics of vengeance that will eventually erupt into further violent chaos, especially in social crisis. Hence the potential for violent contagion manifest in, for example, in enthonational conflicts where the pathos of past victimage spills into mimetic revenge. Girard’s thesis is a warning to those who would draw an overly simple distinction between peaceful sociality and violent destructiveness. However, the Girard/Gans ontology of violence is overly essentialist, ahistorical, largely takes for granted what ‘violence’ is, and in particular (in common with many other theories) is unable to distinguish those situations from which violence is an outcome from those where it is not. Further, the idea of violence as a protean force breaking out of social bonds is inadequate. This is in part because as Collins argues, violence is difficult and requires the breach of social bonds – which then raises the question of what social practices evoke it? It has been argued that sacred rituals such as the Passion can themselves evoke violence while summoning the social bond through transferring guilt and sadness onto scapegoats. This logic changes in post-sacred societies, as Gans suggests. But he is overly optimistic about the potential for post-sacred representations, and especially the market, containing mimesis and realizing a centreless moral community. This connects the argument back to Elias’s problem of informalization. I have argued that the unfulfilled promise of equality and the pseudo-informalization of a consumer culture liberate mimetic desire since the whole point of advertising is to implant the desire for what the other is and has. This, however, risks being a harbinger of shame-based violence especially in spaces of marginalization and abandonment.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Jane Kilby, Maria Diemling and Chris Shilling for reading and commenting on an earlier draft of this article.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

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