Omnicentrism

Omnicentrism is a concept Gans introduces near the end of Originary Thinking. It’s a kind of riposte to the then popular postmodern concept of “decentering”—for Gans, even decentering doesn’t go far enough; every sign user must become a center in himself. Katz accepts the descriptive accuracy of the concept—this does follow from desacralization and the general possibility that a human can occupy the center—while insists that there is always a hierarchy of centers. Insofar as each of us is a center, we are “satellites” of some governing center.