Centered Ordinality

Eric Gans sees the Originary Event as one in which all members of the group issued the first sign (the aborted gesture of appropriation) simultaneously. Katz suggests that this couldn’t be the case, and that if the crisis leading up to the emission of the sign was mimetically driven, the same must be the case, in reverse, so to speak, for the issuing of the sign. Someone, then, must have put forth the gesture (a kind of hesitation) first, with others subsequently imitating that sign. So, if there’s a first, there’s also a second, and a third, and so on. This establishment of a sequential order then must be taken as the model for human activity as such, and “centered ordinality” seemed to express that directly.”

Excerpt From

Anthropomorphics: An Originary Grammar of the Center

Dennis Bouvard