What all businessmen seek is profits; they seek them together with their competitors in the paradoxical relationship that we call competitive. When a business loses money, it must innovate very fast, and it cannot do so without forethought. Usually there is neither money nor...
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... the time for this. In this predicament, business people with a strong survival instinct will usually reason as follows: "If our competitors are more successful than we are, they must be doing something right. We must do it ourselves and the only practical way to go about...
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... it is to imitate them as exactly as we can." This common sense makes less sense than it seems. To begin with, is there such a thing as "absolute innovation"? In the first phase, no doubt, imitation will be rigid and myopic. It will have the ritual quality of the external.
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After a while, however, the element of novelty in the competitor's practice will be mastered and imitation will become bolder. At that moment, it may - or may not - generate some additional improvements which will seem insignificant at first, because it is not suggested...
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.. by the model, but which really is the genuine innovation that will turn things around. I am not denying the specificity of innovation. I am simply observing that, concretely, in a truly innovative process, it is often so continuous with imitation that its presence can...
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... be discovered only after the fact, through a process of abstraction. Our age tries to overcome the modern obsession with the "new" through an orgy of casual imitation, an indiscriminate adoption of all models.
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We must observe that mimesis returns to us in a parodic and derisive mode that is a far cry from the patient, pious and single-minded imitation of the past. The imitation that produced miracles of innovation was still obscurely related to the mimesis of religious ritual.
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The real purpose of post-modern thinking may well be to silence once and for all the question that has never ceased to bedevil "creators" in our democratic world - the question of "Who is innovative and who is not?" If such is the case, post-modernism is only...
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... the latest modality of our romantic "false consciousness," one more twist of the old serpent. There will be more. - Some notes from "Innovation and Repetition" by Rene Girard
@MimeticValue@dopaminendreams@pmarca@startupdaemon@GirardForum@BrunoPerennou@tellfisher3 replies 1 retweet 11 likesShow this thread -
Replying to @Ahimsa_Satya_ @MimeticValue and
Good thread. It will take time to digest in my head.
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I’ve been sitting on his “Innovation and Repetition” article for a while. It’s a mind blower.
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