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 consists of 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. The hominids begin to encircle the food object and attempt to consume it as they would have 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 entail the breakdown of their normal serial pecking order. All of the hominids, given that they are able to model one another's desires increasingly precisely, approach the object simultaneously, as a group, instead of one by one.

This new mimetically enhanced symmetry between each of the hominids generates a mimetic acceleration of the group as a whole towards the object. At this point, the group is no longer dealing with managing simple animal appetites, but desires, a new social phenomenon, where each hominid wants the object more because their mimetic models in the group also desire the same object. This mimetic crisis born of desire 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 increasingly apocalyptic as each approached the object without resort to the normal dominance hierarchy.

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, they all see one another reaching for the object in exactly the same manner, at the same time. They have so precisely modeled one another's desires that their gestures are effectively indistinguishable and the scene has become is pure and undifferentiated mimetic crisis.

At some point, one of the hominids begins to hesitate out of something like terror, and begins to abort their gesture of appropriation. The other hominids see this hesitation and similarly are compelled to imitate this gesture of aborted appropriation. The mimetic acceleration becomes a mimetic deceleration and the gesture of appropriation (a kind of "grabbing") is converted into a gesture of aborted appropriation (a kind of "pointing"). This gesture of aborted appropriation, once issued and recognized by the group becomes the first sign. Adam Katz describes the process in Anthropomorphics as follows:

“The rivalrous imitation that first propels the group toward the center and potentially cataclysmic violence is converted into a pacifying imitation that de-escalates the crisis....We can assume one member proceeding step by step towards the center with his fellows, somewhat unevenly, falling a little behind, seeing their attention drawn to his slowdown, and accentuating that slowdown through posture and gesture only slightly but noticeably different than that of the others. The more they notice, the more he accentuates; the more they accentuate the more the convergence toward the center rears back and goes into reverse. The scene will be successful when there are enough who have exchanged the sign to restrain those who have not yet caught on—at this point, those who have been rehearsing the sign are acting on behalf of the center, as they attend from the central object to its imminent violators, and back again.”

The sign would only have had to work momentarily, but it would have to had to have worked enough to begin a mimetic deceleration. By issuing the sign the hominids are able to successfully defer their violence.

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

This sign constructs an attentional space that is first of all convergent, and therefore dangerous, and then becomes shared—in this way, we can see attention becomes intention without anyone actually intending for this to happen. Similarly, the issuer of the first aborted gesture of appropriation didn't intend for it to become a sign, and yet it did. The hominid group didn't intend to create a community, and yet they created the first human community via the issuance of the sign. The center both compelled them to issue the sign and the center was created when the sign was issued. This is the paradox of signification that first emerges on the Originary Scene and is constitutive of the human.

The object at the center does ultimately 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 object. 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.

In this brief scenic explanation we can account for how mimesis gives rise to desire and a mimetic crisis no longer resolvable by the existing animal pecking order. Without anyone intending to do so, appetite becomes desire, attention becomes intention, the gesture of aborted appropriation becomes the first ostensive sign, and the group of hominids become human.

References

Gans, E. L., Katz, A. L. (2019). The Origin of Language: A New Edition

Katz, A. (2020). Anthropomorphics.