Thread by @Ahimsa_Satya_

"Innovation," from the Latin innovare, innovatio, should signify renewal, rejuvenation from inside, rather than novelty, which is its modern meaning in both English and French. Judging from the Examples in the Oxford English Dictionary and the Littre, the word came into...

Widespread use only in the 16th century, and until the 18th century, its connotations are almost uniformly unfavorable. In the vulgar tongues, as well as in medieval Latin, the word is used primarily in theology, and it means a departure from what by definition...

... should not change - religious dogma. In many instances, innovation is practically synonymous with heresy.

Montaigne hates innovation: "Nothing harries a state except innocation; change alone gives form to injustice and tyranny." In the Essays, innovation is...

... synonymous with "nouvellete," a word which the author uses disparingingly.

A social and political component is present in all this fear of the new, but something else lies behind it, something religious that is more archaic and pagan than Christian.

The negative view of innovation reflects what I call external mediation, a world in which the need for and the identity of all cultural models is taken for granted. This is so true that, in the Middle Ages, the concept of innovation is hardly needed. Its use is usually...

... confined to technical discussions of heresy in Latin. In the vulgar tongues, the need for the word appears only in the last phase of external mediation, which I roughly identify with the 16th and 17th centuries.

The world of external mediation genuinely fears the loss of its transcendental models. Society is felt to be inherently fragile. Any tampering with things as they are could unleash the primordial mob and bring about a regression to original chaos. What is feared is a collapse...

... of religion and society as a whole, through a mimetic contagion that would turn people into a mob.

We have many echoes of this in Shakespeare. In Henry IV, the king speaks:

Poore

Discontents, which gape, and rub the

Elbow at the newes

of hurly burly innovation.

Here, "Hurly burly" means tumult, confusion, storm, violent upheaval.

In 1639, Webster mentions "the Hydra-headed multitude that only gape for innovation."

Even if the bad connotations of our word occasionally resurfaced in the 18th century, the story of the hour...

... was not the perpetuation of the past, but its overthrow. It was not the core meaning of "innovation" that changed, but its affective "aura."

The reason, of course, was the shift away from theology, and even philosophy, towards science and technology.

The word was interpreted in a new context which caused examples of brilliant and useful inventions to spring to the mind. That good impression automatically spilled over into areas and disciplines unrelated to science and technology.

This process exactly reversed the earlier one, when the bad connotations rooted in theology extended to the non-theological uses of the word.

As early as the beginning of the 19th century, innovation became the god that we are still worshiping today.

The new cult meant that a new scourge had descended upon the world - "stagnation." Before the 18th century, "stagnation" was unknown; suddenly it spread its gloom far and wide.

The more innovative the capitals of the modern spirit became, the more "stagnant" and "boring" the surrounding countryside appeared.

As I said before, the negative view of innovation is inseparable from a conception of the spiritual and intellectual life dominated by stable...

... imitation. Being the source of eternal truth, of eternal beauty, of eternal goodness, the models should never change. Only when these transcendental models are toppled, can innovation acquire a positive meaning.

External mediation gives way to a world in which...

.., at least in principle, individuals and communities are free to adopt whichever models they prefer and, better still, no model at all.

This seems to go without saying. Our world has always believed that "to be innovative" and "to be imitative" are two incompatible attitudes.

This was already true when innovation was feared; now that it is desired, it is more true than ever.

The romantic historian puts innovation on a par with foundation and creation itself, the creation ex nihilo, no doubt, that, up to that time, had been exclusive monopoly of...

... the biblical God.

A complete break with the past is viewed as the sole achievement worthy of a "creator."

Just as the measure of a painter's talent is now his capacity to innovate in painting, the measure of a lover's love is his or her capacity to innovate in the...

... field of love-making. To be "with it" in the France of 1920, one had to be "innovative" even in the privacy of the boudoir. What a burden on all lovers' shoulders! Far from exorcising the urge to mimic famous lovers in literature and history, compulsory innovation can only...

... inflame it further.

This is how inconsistency has become the major intellectual virtue of the avant-garde. But the real credit for the tabula rasa school of innovation should go to Nietzsche, who was tired of repeating with everybody else that a great thinker...

... should have no model. He went one better, as always, and refused to be a model - the mark of genius.

This is still a sensation that is being piously repeated today.

Nietzsche is our supreme model of model-repudiation, our revered guru of guru-renunciation.

The emphasis on ruptures, fragments and discontinuitites is still all the rage in our universities.

This extreme view of innovation has been dominant for so long that even our dictionaries take it for granted. Innovation is supposed to exclude imitation as completely...

... as imitation excludes it. Examples of how the word should be used are of this type: "it is easier to imitate than to innovate."

This conception is false, I believe, but its falsity is easier to show in some domains than in others.

The easiest illustration is to be seen in contemporary market economies. This is certainly a domain in which innovation occurs on a massive, even frightening scale, at least in the so-called developed countries.

It is not difficult to observe the type of behavior that fosters..

..economic innovation. In Economics, innovation has a precise definition; it is sometimes the bringing of technical invention into widespread practical use, but it can also be improvements in production technique, or in management.

It is anything as yet untried that gives...

...a business an edge over its competitors. That is why innovation is often regarded as the principal, even the sole source of profits.

Business people can speak lyrically about their mystical faith in innovation and the brave new world it is creating, but the driving force...

... behind their constant innovation is far from utopian. In a vigorous economy, it is a matter of survival, pure and simple.

Business firms must innovate in order to remain competitive.

Competition, from the Latin words, cum and petere, means to seek together.

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...

... 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...

... 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.

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...

.. 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...

... 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.

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.

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...

... 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

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