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 when and where 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 language, communication would be impossible, and so the Originary Scene is a hypothesis about the scene of that shared origin.
Specifically, the Originary Scene attempts to hypothesize how it is possible for a community of hominids without the capacity for representation to become capable of representation. We cannot take the absurd position that pre-linguistic beings already had something like "ideas" they wanted to "express" because that would be to assume the very thing we are attempting to explain. Instead, GA attempts to develop 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. Our representational human culture comes into being only when our hominid ancestors became too mimetic and could no longer rely on their existing animal mechanisms to withholding their potential violence.
The animal pecking order common to higher animals depends on the group’s forming a queue structure rather than a centralized community. Violence is suppressed at least temporarily by this serial hierarchy and the hypothetical Originary Scene presupposes that the progression of mimetic ability among a specific group of proto-humans reached the point where that serial hierarchy broke down.
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.
Ordinarily, like all higher primates, the Alpha would eat first, then pass the remainder to the Beta, and so on down the serial hierarchy. However, the mimetic capacities or these hominids must have been so intense that the normal serial pecking order would have broken down. All of the hominids, no longer held back by their animal dominance structure, would have started to simultaneously approach the object in a kind of fearful symmetry of mimetic acceleration. Animal appetite has been transformed into desire, a social phenomenon, that is enhanced by the mimetic models simultaneous desire for the same object.
The Alpha, normally the first to appropriate the food object, is now facing an entire group. It is not just the Beta, or an individual rival, that contests the alpha, but the entire mimetic group as a whole. Each of the hands reaches out for the object of appropriation simulteanoulsy and the animal pecking order ceases to hold any of them back as their mimetic desire accelerates them towards the object at the center.
This desire intensifies the mimetic crisis and within the group some member hesitates, presumably out of something like terror, and is seen by others to hesitate, and is imitated by others. As each of the hominids reach out like hands of children at a party for the last peace of cake in a gesture of appropriation, one of them hesitates, and makes a gesture of aborted appropriation. Something like a "grabbing" becomes something like a "pointing" and others 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 enough to begin a kind of mimetic deceleration that converts this mimetic
The mimetic acceleration turns into a mimetic deceleration and as they all simultaneously issue this same gesture. The animal pecking order has been transcended and a new order is born: a social order, with a center, and a group of hominids on the periprhy, all sharing joint attention via the same object. The first sign, like all signs after it, defers violence through representation.
A new species i they would partake in a new kind of awareness shared by each of them that at least while they are exchanging this new sign they are not fighting over the central object. This would have been memorable and desirable and worthy of repetition.
The first sign is an ostensive sign.
It is not an act of existential free will on the part of each member of the new community. None of them could articulate such a will, not only because they have no language in which to do so, but because the sign cannot be attributed to an intentionality “internal” to any of the members of the group. Each is only repeating the others’ reference to the central object—none of them could be the origin. And yet intention has been introduced into the community, in the form of the object itself. As the participants on the scene see each other sharing attention to the object of desire, the only agency that could be holding them back is the potential victim itself. The creation of the human is mediated by the creation of the sacred center as the creator of the human.
The victim 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. Naturally, this hypothetical account in fully developed language that is both unavailable to the participants on the scene and marked by the limitations of constructing the emergence of language from within language, must present coherently a sequence that might have developed over a series of similar events—and, more importantly, might be reconstructed for memory through more orderly rituals. The value of such an account, though, lies in the need to hypothesize the sign being repeated, made memorable, and acting generatively within the community. Eventually the ritual would be moved to prior to the act of consumption, so as to prevent in advance the possibility that this time the scene might not play out in ideal form.
The paradoxes of deferral we see on the originary scene are enduring features of the human. That which we desire and which therefore thrusts itself upon our attention, is given excess desirability through our mimetic relations with our fellows—desiring something is inseparable from imagining others desiring it. For this very reason we are forbidden our object of desire, as we intuit the violence implicit in our approach to it. And yet, we might be granted our desire, insofar as our satisfaction is mediated through the cultural (sign) systems that allot desirable objects in such a way as to build layers of deferral that themselves keep at bay the need to improvise means of deferral in dire circumstances (which circumstances, nevertheless, on occasion occur).
References
Gans, E. L., Katz, A. L. (2019). The Origin of Language: A New Edition
