Originary Scene

Origin

The Originary Scene 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

Tthe 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. GA resists 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 that withhold their potential violence are in jeopardy.

Characteristics

The scene starts with 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. This food object 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 with their animal dominance hierarchy mediating the consumption of the object.

In the animal dominance hierarchy, as with all higher primates, the Alpha eats first, then passes the remainder to the Beta, and so on down the serial "queued" hierarchy. However, our hypothesis entails that the new mimetic capacities of these hominids must have progressed such that their normal serial pecking order would have become untenable. All of the hominids, given that they are able to model one another's desires increasingly precisely, would have each begun to approach the object simultaneously, as a group, instead of one by one.

This new kind of mimetically enhanced symmetry between each of the hominids would generate a mimetic acceleration of the group towards the object. At this point, the group is no longer dealing with simple animal appetite, but desire, a new social phenomenon, where each one wants the object more because their mimetic models in the group also desire the object. This mimetic crisis is irresolvable by the animal dominance hierarchies that previously kept appetitive violence at bay.

The Alpha, normally the first to appropriate the food object, would now be facing not just the Beta, a single individual rival, but the entire mimetic group as a whole. The Alpha would not be able to physically contest the entire group, and the situation would become seemingly apocalyptic as each rushed towards the object without resort to the old dominance hierarchy that had by now been transcended by the hominids mimetic desire.

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, one of the hominids begins to hesitate out of something like terror, and that gesture of appropriation becomes a gesture of aborted appropriation. In other words, something like a "grabbing" at the object is covered into something like a "pointing" at the object the other hominids recognize this hesitation on the part of the individual. First one, then two, then each hominid in the group imitates this new aborted gesture of appropriation. Once this gesture is imitated by everyone in the group it becomes the first sign; pointing to the object at the center instead of appropriating it.

It would only have had to work very momentarily, but this sign would have to had to have been enough to begin a mimetic deceleration. By all issuing the sign the hominids resist, at least for the moment, appropriating the object and the sign is able to successfully defer their violence.

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

// add something on how the object is also God, the center, the name-of-God and that the sign doesn't come from the periphery, but from the Center.

The object at the center does need to be consumed, and the community uses the new sign to ensure that the consumption is 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 violent consumption of the object), the tension generated by the prior restraint is released. 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

Katz, A. (2020). Anthropomorphics.