A Brief Introduction to Generative Anthropology
Eric Gans
Un peu d'histoire
Although the term Generative Anthropology dates
from the publication of The End of Culture in 1985, GA was
born in 1978 when I had the good fortune to be René Girard's colleague
for a semester at Johns Hopkins University. The conception of the originary
event, as first expounded in The Origin of Language (1981),
was my attempt to combine Girard's notion of the generation of the human
from the intensification of the mimetic with my own notion that the declarative
sentence was derived from a more primitive form I called the ostensive
(e.g.,
"Fire!" "Man overboard!"). I thus reformulated Girard's scene of mimetic
crisis, in which the scapegoat was transformed into a peace-bringing
divinity, as the scene of the
genesis of language, a scene I hypothesized
to be unique for our species.
In my work since then, I have attempted not merely
to refine the formulation of the originary hypothesis, but to expand
the model to the other central manifestations of the human: desire, the
esthetic, the religious. After having turned away from Girard's categories
of scapegoating and violence, my more recent work marks a return to
Girard, giving new emphasis to the sparagmos or destruction
of the victim as an essential part of the originary scene, and, above all,
radically reformulating the hypothesis in terms of the mimetic triangle
defined in Girard's Mensonge romantique.
Since 1987, I have taught an annual or biannual
seminar in GA at UCLA, and in 1990, the UCLA Department of French held
a first GA colloquium, in which several students from the seminar
participated, along with colleagues from other universities. In 1994, as
a result of the activities of GA seminar alumni (and colloquium participants)
Tom Bertonneau and Matt Schneider, the MLA held a special session at its
annual meeting in San Diego on GA and Anthropoetics.
The challenge is now to apply the hypothetical originary
model of GA to the concrete historical data of human culture in the broadest
sense of the term. This activity is now in its beginning stages. We trust
that the creation of the GAlist
and of our on-line journal Anthropoetics will help make the
power of originary thinking available to humanists and social scientists
everywhere.
Fundamental Concepts of Generative Anthropology
The human may most simply be defined by the mimetic
principle: that in human beings, as opposed to all other creatures,
mimetic rivalry within the species poses a greater danger to its survival
than the external forces of nature. Language, like the other elements of
human culture, cannot be understood as an inevitable product of evolution;
it emerged only because prehuman modes of interaction were insufficient
to prevent the nascent species from destroying itself.
Humanity is, in Aristotle's words, the animal that
possesses the logos. The generation of linguistic signification
from appetitive relations, or, in other terms, the generation of (vertical)
transcendence from (horizontal) immanence, is a variation of the triangle
of mimetic desire. Normally we imitate each other's appetitive acts by
performing the same action, but on a different object; you pick an apple,
I see you, and pick my own apple. But as a result of the intensification
of mimetic tension, there comes a time when your gesture and mine converge
on the same object. At this point, mimesis is blocked; the appropriative
gesture is aborted. The only solution is to refocus from the human actor
to the object of the action. Although this now-unique object of desire
cannot itself be reproduced, it may be represented by an easily
reproducible sign of human language. The aborted gesture of appropriation
becomes the originary ostensive sign.
1. The Originary Event
According to the originary hypothesis, the first
occurrence of language was in the originary event or scene
of language. The birth of representation within the mimetic triangle involves
a new form of consciousness. Not only is mimesis of the human other not
essentially conscious, it essentially excludes language. (The game of Simon
Says exploits the fact that language interferes with rather than aids
imitation.) In contrast, in the case of mimesis of the object, or representation,
my sign imitates not the object's actions but its formal closure, to which
I must be attentive in a new way.
But although the mimetic triangle contains all the
elements necessary for the emergence of the sign as the solution of the
mimetic paradox, language as the foundation of the human community can
only have arisen in a collective event, where the multiplicity of
the participants multiplies mimetic tension. The object desired by all
members of the group becomes the center of a circle surrounded by peripheral
individuals all mediating each other's desire. The aborted gesture of
appropriation occurs as the solution to an originary mimetic crisis
in which the group's existence is menaced by the potential violence of
mimetic rivalry over the object. Animal hierarchy that previously prevented
general conflict by limiting rivalry to one-on-one relationships breaks
down in the intensity of this crisis. The emission of the first sign is
the originary event that founds the human community.
2. Originary Analysis
The anthropology based on the originary hypothesis
must situate the essential categories of the human: language, desire (as
opposed to mere appetite), the esthetic, the sacred and the religious,
the economic/political, etc., as moments of the originary scene.
Everything essential to the human must come into existence within this
scene, since otherwise the human would be constituted without it. The operation
of situating the fundamental categories of the human within the originary
scene is called originary analysis. The linguistic, the sacred,
and the esthetic are the three fundamental forms of human interaction,
and most of my work in GA has been devoted to their elucidation:
the linguistic in The Origin of Language, the sacred/religious in
Science
and Faith, and the esthetic in The End of Culture and the second
part of Originary Thinking. GA allows us to treat these apparently
disparate categories as moments of a single, parsimonious model.
3. Originary Love and Resentment
In contrast with Girard's model, which makes violence
the primary element of human mimesis, for GA, the human begins with
the renunciation, or more precisely, the deferral of violence. Another
Derridean term, différance, nicely expresses the relationship
between the deferral of violence and the differentiation of the central
object from the humans on the periphery. As the object of human desire
whose conflict-averting inaccessibility to human appetites permits the
birth of the human community, the central being is the object of what we
may call originary love. But in its refusal of itself to the desiring
subject, the central being is also the object of originary resentment.
This love and resentment lead us to attribute to the object the power of
self-withdrawal that is in anthropological terms the resultant of the desires
of the human community that surrounds it.
4. Desire
Desire, not mere appetite, is the essential human relation
with the world. The originary model of desire is given in the relationship
between the human subjects on the periphery of the circle and the sacred
object in the center. In the desiring imagination of the participants,
the aborted gesture of appropriation is prolonged toward the object. Thus
the originary object of human desire is the unique object of signficance,
the center of the circle. The universality of the sign extends Girard's
theory of mimetic or mediated desire beyond the rivalry of
two subjects for a single object; human desire assimilates its object to
sacred centrality. The source of the being that the subject of mediated
desire finds in the other is the originary center; all desire is desire
for participation in central being. The general principle by which we should
analyze specific instances of desire is that in humans, in accordance with
the mimetic principle, the mimetic takes priority over the appetitive.
5. Signification: Language
The minimal system of representation is that inaugurated
by the originary aborted gesture. The linguistic sign is characterized
by a maximal ease of production and reproduction, in contrast with the
extreme difficulty of reproducing the central object of desire. The material
reality of language as performance attaches it to the performing arts
that elaborate on different aspects of this materiality: music,
that of rhythm and sound; dance, that of corporeal movement; and
poetry,
which operates on the materiality of the words themselves. But for language
itself, materiality is merely an element to minimalize. Whence Saussure's
doctrine that, in its essence, language is only a system of differences.
GA's most significant contribution in the
linguistic domain is its insistence on the originarity of the ostensive
form, from which the imperative and then the declarative
are derived. Metaphysics, the intellectual attitude of Western philosophy,
is best defined by its unexamined presupposition that the declarative sentence
or proposition is the fundamental form of language.
6. The Sacred: Religion
Because of its insistence on originary centrality,
GA
has a particular affinity with religious conceptions of the human. For
believers, God preexisted and created man; for nonbelievers, the relationship
is exactly the reverse. But since the inaccessible central object is the
first instance of the sacred--so that the first linguistic sign may be
called the name-of-God--humanity and God may be said to have come
into existence at the same moment. The deferral of a decision as to this
priority allows GA to assimilate the cognitive value of religious
conceptions of the human within the anthropological domain. Religious doctrine
becomes useless to science only when it leaves the human sphere for the
natural world; theology is good anthropology, but bad cosmology.
7. The Esthetic: Art
The sign represents the central object; but in each
individual's imagination or internal scene of representation, the
object appears in itself, independent of the mediation of the sign.
Hence the subject oscillates between the contemplation of the sign as designating
the object and the contemplation of the object designated by the sign;
we call this oscillation the esthetic effect. It constitutes a direct
experience of mimetic paradox, of the constantly renewed generation
of the vertical sign-relation from the horizontal movement of desire.
The spectator forgets the mediation of the sign
in the imaginary contemplation of the object as potentially accessible,
but he must return to this mediation for his imagination to be able to
conceive the object at all. The contemplation of the object in itself produces
resentment at the object's apparent witholding of itself; but this resentment
is purged (to translate Aristotle's term catharsis) on the
renewal of the formal mediation of the sign; the spectator cannot experience
the inaccessibility of the object simply as self-refusal within the "horizontal"
world of desire, for its presence depends on the "vertical" world of the
sign as well. The spectator's separation from the esthetic representation
is experienced as a formal barrier or frame that surrounds it, independently
of the reality of the inaccessible central figure that is necessary to
the sacred. Art is more "portable" than religion because the experience
of the esthetic effect does not depend, as does that of religious faith,
on a historical memory of the scene's authenticity. With regard to art's
purging of resentment, we may distinguish between popular art, whose
representations satisfy resentment (or more precisely, effect a utopian
reconciliation between love and resentment), and high art, where
the representation itself reflects in an ironic mise en abîme
the paradoxical nature of esthetic experience.
8. Economics and Politics
The most significant implications of the originary
hypothesis in the domain of social organization are the distinctions between
morality
and ethics and between the central cultural and the eccentric
economic spheres of the social order.
All humans have in common the moral model
constituted by the originary event. The equalitarian intuition expressed
by the Declaration of Independence's "all men are created equal" is modeled
on the symmetry of the participants' exchange of linguistic signs around
the central object. The universal moral model contrasts with the historically
specific ethics of given social orders, whose contingency reflects the
obligation to deal with the exchange of (scarce) things as opposed
to (indefinitely reproducible) signs. Economic activity, the production
of objects of potential practical value, takes place away from the ritual
center of society; the return of these objects to the center for communal
evaluation is the originary model of the marketplace.
The originary foundation of ethics in morality,
as understood within the Judaeo-Christian tradition, reaches its highest
development in the Gospel utopia of the Kingdom of God, where the
moral model itself serves as an ethic. In the Christian West, the free
market emerges as the historical adaptation of the moral model to the
exchange of things; each individual freely brings his goods for evaluation
to the market, where prices are fixed by mutual agreement. As a means of
mitigating the generalized resentment that results from the tension
between equality of moral and legal status and inequality of economic means,
the liberal-democratic system of government supplements the economic market
with a political marketplace that reaffirms the moral model by giving
each citizen a "voice" or vote in the political process by means of which
individual and group resentments are negotiated.
9. The Future of GA
Originary thinking confronts the ongoing activity
of the humanities and the human sciences as a new paradigm. The
rethinking of the totality of human institutions on the basis of the originary
hypothesis will be carried out by those willing to overcome their discomfort
with a new way of thinking for the sake of the intellectual excitement
it provides.
I welcome your queries, comments, or suggestions
concerning this text.
Return
to Anthropoetics home page | Feedback
Eric Gans / gans@humnet.ucla.edu
Last updated:
