External Mediation

Definition

External mediation is the form of mimetic desire in which the model inhabits a different world from the subject — separated by time, social position, or distance sufficient to prevent direct rivalry. The model inflames desire without becoming a personal rival.

Examples

Girard’s paradigm case is the protagonist of Cervantes’s Don Quixote: a provincial nobleman who takes the chivalric heroes of romance novels as his models. These heroes cannot compete with him for the same women, lands, or social positions — they are purely fictional and temporally remote. The mediation is external, and the result is a kind of innocent, romantic obsession.

Other examples:

• A student who takes Newton as a model for scientific ambition (Newton is safely dead)
• A reader inspired by a saint’s life (the saint is not competing for worldly prizes)
• A fan who models their taste on a celebrity (who will never encounter them directly)

In all these cases, the model points toward objects or qualities without entering into direct competition for them.

External Mediation Is Relatively Benign

Compared to internal mediation, external mediation tends to be psychologically and socially safer. The model can inspire without generating rivalry. The idealization of distant models — saints, heroes, great historical figures — is partly a cultural technology for providing models of desire that do not produce destructive competition.

Girard observed that traditional cultures provided many such models: saints, ancestors, mythological heroes. Modernity has increasingly replaced these distant models with proximate peers and celebrities who hover between external and internal mediation — close enough to inspire, close enough to compete.

Social Media and the Collapse of Distance

A key feature of digital culture is that it has compressed the distance between models and subjects. Celebrities who were formerly safely external — physically and socially remote — now appear on the same platform as one’s immediate peers, interacting in real time. The line between external and internal mediation has become blurry.

This is one reason Girard’s theory has become more, not less, relevant in the social media age.