Originary Scene

Introduction

The Originary Scene is the central concept of Generative Anthropology. It is the origin of the human and the origin of language, religion, culture, irony, science, and everything else recognizably human. Eric Gans, the founder of Generative Anthropology, discovered/invented the Originary Scene and published the first articulation of the scene in his book The Origin of Language, in 1981. Gans referred to the Originary Scene as the "little bang" of culture, analogous to the "big bang" of the Universe.

Origin of the Hypothesis

Rene Girard and Eric Gans

The Originary Scene was inspired by Rene Girard's Scapegoating Mechanism and Eric Gans was one of the first PhD students of Rene Girard. Unlike Girard's hypothesis, the Originary Scene is scenic, not mechanistic, but it retains the same starting point as Girard: humans are the most mimetic (or imitative) species. Gans’s starting point is Rene Girard’s understanding of the conflictual nature of mimesis: as humans are the most mimetic species, and mimesis generates rivalry because our model, the more we model ourselves on him, becomes our rival for the same object, mimesis leads to crisis, in which the continued existence of the community can be at stake. Girard’s hypothesis is that in some such crisis of a “proto-human” species of hominid, a single member of the group is “marked” and singled out as the source of the mimetic contagion, with this “scapegoat” then murdered by the rest of the group. The mimetic frenzy of undifferentiation is thereby “discharged” upon this single “absolutely” different member. The scapegoat then becomes the first divine being, insofar as he has “saved” the community.

Origin of Desire

“Gans sees the outcome of the originary event differently. The limit of Girard’s account is that there is no reason for the event in question to become meaningful and memorable. Why should the killing of a conspecific, not a very unusual event among mammals, transform the group in any way? I used the word “murder” in my description of the scene, but “murder” presupposes a moral order, and nothing in Girard’s scenario accounts for how the scene would create such an order. This is another way of saying that Girard doesn’t account for the emergence of language, which would itself be a prerequisite of a moral order and a community to share it. For Gans, the hypothetical scene is revised as follows. Gans assumes that the mimetic crisis is organized around some object of appetitive attention—most likely some food source, perhaps a recent kill. Ordinarily, among the higher primate species, the object would be consumed in order, first by the Alpha animal, then by the Beta, and so on. But on this occasion, the mimetic rivalry induced by the object overrides the pecking order as all members of the group move toward the object at the center. Appetite becomes “desire,” that is, a social phenomenon involving one’s relation to others and not merely the object itself. Desire intensifies the mimetic crisis. However, within the group, some member hesitates, presumably out of something like terror (“anxiety” would not be quite right here), is seen by others to hesitate, and is imitated by others.

The First Sign

The gesture indicates a renunciation, perhaps momentary (but that is enough), of the desired object. This, what Gans calls “the gesture of aborted appropriation,” is the first sign. 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; the order provided by the animal pecking order is replaced by an order mediated by the sign, which defers violence through representation. A new species is born: the human, the only species, as Gans puts it, that poses a greater danger to its own survival than is posed to it by anything in its environment.

The first sign is an ostensive sign—that is, it is inextricable from the event in which it is issued and therefore constitutes the object it refers to. But this 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 Sparagmos

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.

Paradox and Deferral

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). The alienation of our desires must be represented to us, and we must receive our desired object as a gift from the center. “The fact that many take short cuts and evade or violate the cultural mechanisms that formalize our satisfactions as an exchange with the center doesn’t contradict this claim—rather, it explains our resentment towards those transgressors and our marking them as “criminal” or “immoral.” The immoral and criminal must tell themselves, meanwhile, that their own exceptional relation to the center, due to unique circumstances or unusual abilities, authorizes a form of appropriation forbidden to others. Our most immediate desires throw us into a net of social obligations.”

References

http://anthropoetics.ucla.edu/gaintro/