Originary Scene

Introduction

The Originary Scene or Originary Event is the central concept of Generative Anthropology. This hypothetical historical event is 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 scenes 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

The Originary Scene is a hypothesis about what must have been an actual historical event. We will likely never find out exactly where or when the Originary Scene took place, but something like it must have taken place in order for us to be using language right now. Without a shared origin of human language, communication would be impossible, and so the Originary Scene is a hypothesis about that first shared scene of language origin.

Specifically, the Originary Scene is an attempt to hypothesize how it is possible that a community of hominids without the capacity for representation can become capable of representation. We cannot take the common but absurd 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 this ability.

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 to withhold their potential violence are in jeopardy.

The Originary Scene

The Originary Scene begins when a group of proto-humans, possibly a hunting party, kill or come across a source of food. This food object of would become the center of their attention and the hungry hominids would encircle it and attempt to consume it as they had done many times before.

Ordinarily, like all higher primates, the Alpha would eat first, then pass the remainder to the Beta, and so on down the serial "queued" hierarchy. However, our hypothesis entails that the mimetic capacities of these hominids had progressed such that their normal serial pecking order would have been under threat of breakdown. All of the hominids, given their highly mimetic capacity as they all start to model one another increasingly precisely, would have begun to simultaneously approach the object instead of one by one. This new kind of mimetically enhanced fearful symmetry would be a sort of mimetic acceleration towards the object from all sides. We are no longer dealing with just animal appetite, but desire, a social phenomenon, where each one wants the object more because their mimetic model also desires the object.

The Alpha, normally the first to appropriate the food object, is now facing the entire group. It is not just the Beta, or an individual rival, that the Alpha needs to contest, 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 something like a "gesture of appropriation". Like hands of children at a party for the last peace of cake, one of them hesitates, and their a gesture of appropriation becomes a gesture of aborted appropriation. Something like a "grabbing" becomes something like a "pointing" and others hominids recognize this hesitation. First one, then two, then each one in the group imitates this new aborted gesture of appropriation which becomes the first sign.

It would have been only momentary, but this sign would have to have been enough to begin a kind of mimetic deceleration.

For the first time, the hierarchical and serial animal pecking order has been transcended and a new order is born: a social order, with a center, and a human community capable of using signs. The first sign is ostensive, and it signifies the sharing of joint attention of everyone on the scene with the object at the center. The first sign, like all signs after it, defers violence through representation.

The object at the center does need to be consumed, and the emergent community does need to put its new sign to work to ensure this can be done in a communal and non-violent (or, sufficiently non-violent so that the mimetic crisis is not re-activated) manner. In the sparagmos, the tension generated by the prior restraint is released, and so this danger does present itself as the community attacks the meal in this unprecedented manner. Resentment at the object itself, for imposing restraint and refusing itself, intensifies the devouring of the body. The only thing preventing each member from overreaching his bounds and turning on his fellows is the sign itself, which we can imagine working within the sparagmos as a kind of reminder of the collective limits making this peaceful consumption 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

http://anthropoetics.ucla.edu/gaintro/