Originary Scene

Origin

The Originary Scene (or Originay Event) is the central concept of Generative Anthropology. It is a hypothetical historical event that was the origin of the human and simultaneously the origin of language. Eric Gans, the founder of Generative Anthropology, articulated the first version of the Originary Scene in his 1981 book The Origin of Language. Gans referred to the Originary Scene as the "little bang" of human culture, analogous to the "big bang" of the Universe.

Freud, Girard, and Gans

Eric Gans was one of the first PhD students of René Girard and the Originary Scene is modeled on Girard's Scapegoating Mechanism. Girard in turn modeled his mechanism on Freud's description the father murdered by his sons. Gans recognized the shared core of these events that purport to describe the origin of the human social order as "the designation of the central figure by a sign".

Generative Anthropology's Originary Scene, unlike that of Freud, Girard, and all other theories of the origin of language focuses on the paradoxical emergence of this first sign.

Setting the Scene

Tthe Originary Scene is an attempt to hypothesize how it is possible that a community of hominids without the capacity for representation became capable of representation. GA resists the common but untenable position that pre-linguistic beings already had something like "ideas" they wanted to "express" because that would entail assuming in advance the very thing we want to explain. Instead, the Originary Scene is an attempt to articulate a minimal account of the origin of something radically new, a sign, from a community that does not yet have the capacity for signification.

The Originary Scene shares the same starting point as Girard: human beings are the most mimetic species, and mimesis leads to rivalry and conflict. Language comes into being to defer violence only when our hominid ancestors became too mimetic and their existing animal mechanisms that withhold their potential violence fail to restrain them.

Characteristics

The scene/event consists of a group of highly mimetic proto-humans, possibly a hunting party, who kill or come across an "appetitive object" like a deer or a similar source of food. Normally, according to the animal pecking orders shared by higher primates, the Alpha eats first, then passes the remainder of food to the Beta, and so on down a serial "queued" hierarchy.

However, given that these hominids are highly mimetic they are no longer just appetitive, but desirous, of the central object. Desire is mimetic and social phenomenon where each hominid wants the object more because their mimetic models in the group also desire the object. Desire also leads to mimetic crisis as the Alpha, normally the first to appropriate the food object, would now be facing not just the Beta, but the entire mimetic group as a whole.

Each of the hominids would be getting closer to the central object and reaching out their hands in what Gans calls a "gesture of appropriation". Like the hands of children at a party for reaching for the last piece of cake, they all see one another reaching for the object in exactly the same manner, at the same time. This undifferentiated mimetic crisis would be at least potentially extremely violent and at some point, one of the hominids begins to hesitate out of something like terror, and is compelled to abort his gesture of appropriation.

The other hominids see this hesitation and similarly are compelled to imitate this gesture of aborted appropriation. The mimetic acceleration becomes a mimetic deceleration as the gesture of appropriation (a kind of "grabbing") is converted by the group into a gesture of aborted appropriation (a kind of "pointing"). This gesture of aborted appropriation, once issued and recognized by the group, becomes the first sign.

For the first time, the serial animal pecking order has been transcended and a new kind of social order is born: a centralized community, organized around a shared sign that each of them can refer to. The first sign is ostensive because it refers to an object that is on the scene and it signifies the sharing of attention by everyone on the scene with the object at the center. The purpose of that first sign, like all signs after it, is the deferral of violence through representation.

The issuer of the first aborted gesture of appropriation didn't intend for it to become a sign, and yet it did. The hominid group didn't intend to create a community, and yet they created the first human community via the issuance of the sign. The center both compelled them to issue the sign and the center was created when the sign was issued. This is the paradox of signification that first emerges on the Originary Scene and is constitutive of the human.

After the succesful issuance of the sign, the object at the center does ultimately need to be consumed, and this happens in the sparagmos where the sign would be issued again as a reminder of the communities collective limits and would make the peaceful consumption of the object possible. Following the sparagmos, as the members of the community face each other over the remains of their victim/meal/deity, the sign would be issued once again, this time pointing to the remainders and mementos of the sacred being, marking the first ritual.

References

Gans, E. L., Katz, A. L. (2019). The Origin of Language: A New Edition

Katz, A. (2020). Anthropomorphics.