Originary Scene

Introduction

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.

The Originary Scene

The Originary Scene begins when a group of proto-humans, possibly a hunting party, 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.

Ordinarily, like all higher primates, the Alpha would eat first, then pass the remainder to the Beta, and so on down this 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 become untenable. All of the hominids, given their highly mimetic capacity as they model one another increasingly precisely, would have each begun to approach the object simultaneously instead of one by one. This new kind of mimetically enhanced symmetry would generate a mimetic acceleration towards the object from all sides as they encircled it. At this point, the group is no longer dealing with simply animal appetite, but desire, a new social phenomenon, where each one wants the object more because their mimetic model also desires the object. The animal dominance hierarchies that kept appetitive violence at bay begin to buckle under the weight of the hominids mimetic desires.

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. He would not be able to contest the entire group, and the situation would become seemingly apocalyptic as they all rush for the object without resort to the old dominance hierarchy that has now been transcended by their 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 peace of cake, one of the hominids hesitates, and their a gesture of appropriation becomes a gesture of aborted appropriation. Something like a "grabbing" becomes something like a "pointing" and the other hominids recognize this hesitation. First one, then two, then each hominid in the group imitates this new aborted gesture of appropriation which once repeated by everyone in the group becomes the first sign.

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

For the first time, the hierarchical and serial animal pecking order has been transcended and a new kind of 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 community put its new sign to work to ensure that this 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 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

Katz, A. (2020). Anthropomorphics.